Combining AI and Quantum Mechanics to Improve Drug and Vaccine Discovery

Andrii: Can you briefly introduce yourself and how you became a part of PharmCADD’s story? A couple of words about the company’s services and your pipeline of products? 

Sangwook: In addition to my CEO/CTO position at PharmCADD, I am teaching physics at Pukyong National University in South Korea. Although I earned my bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, I realized that my academic interest was in biological physics as well as quantum physics. I followed my interest at the graduate schools and earned my Ph.D. in condensed matter physics at Iowa State University. I learned various computational chemistry principles and machine learning (ML) approaches during my postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When I became a faculty member in 2014, the application of computational approaches including the use of AI/ML algorithms in drug discovery was still at the very early stage.  Mr. Taehyung Kwon, co-CEO of PharmCADD, quickly realized the huge potential of my research achievements when he visited my research lab, and encouraged me to build a biotech company together. Mr. Kwon and I made a business plan together in late 2018 and registered the company’s name in March 2019. That’s the history of PharmCADD. 

Our business model does not include “fee for service” at the moment, we would rather perform collaborative R&D with partners for an upfront fee (or, technology access fee), milestone-based payment, and royalty payment. We would also want to provide pre-clinically ready small molecule compounds for license-out deals. Currently, we are developing several internal and collaborative pipelines including anticancer drugs (Figure 1). We have also licensed-out thermostable and translationally efficient mRNA sequences of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to a Korean biotech company, EyeGene. This pipeline is the first mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in Korea which is in phase 1/2a clinical trial.     

Andrii: So, the company is developing both therapeutics and vaccines -- those are quite different things. How do you manage to run programs in those different areas simultaneously? What resources, including funding and team, do you have for such diverse scope of R&D efforts? 

As you mentioned, development strategies for small molecule therapeutics and for vaccines are quite different. I haven’t dreamed to develop both modalities when I formed the R&D team. As you might expect, I built R&D team focusing on small molecule therapeutics at first. However, COVID-19 came to us unexpectedly and the need for therapeutics became an imminent and urgent issue. Fortunately, I had research experience in nucleic acid 3D structure, and some of my R&D team members were trained in RNA sequence optimization research at MIT. In collaboration with EyeGene, which has ongoing vaccine programs with a promising liposome delivery technology, I could jump into the mRNA vaccine development program with strong confidence and enthusiasm. We anticipate that this vaccine program would enter into phase 3 in clinical trials in the second half of 2022. The motivation that I would run both small molecule therapeutics and vaccine programs come from the diverse research background and the high quality of my R&D team. PharmCADD has over 50 scientists and engineers in the R&D team, and among them, 35 scientists have Ph.D. degrees in the field of computational chemistry, physics, biology, and Artificial Intelligence. That is why we could carry diverse R&D programs like the kinase inhibitor, PROTAC, GPCR antagonist, drug delivery system (DDS), RNA-based vaccine, and RNA structure-targeting drugs.