BiopharmaTrend.com

In today’s technological world, data is perhaps the single most important driver of a business’ success. Access to relevant data allows businesses to make a variety of informed decisions. Unfortunately, acquiring this data can be quite cumbersome as employees spend countless hours manually reviewing documents. This is especially true for more complex reviews such as journal publications, patient records, or technical specifications. Sysrev offers enterprise a platform for managing collaborative document reviews, injecting machine learning into the review process to increase accuracy and efficiency. Depending on the data source and task, Sysrev can even automate data extraction.

Sysrev, launched in June 2019, is an intelligent platform for document reviews and automated data extraction. Sysrev optimizes the review process with machine learning and adds efficiency through its intuitive, and collaborative, interface.

Computer-aided drug design (CADD) is a central part of so-called “rational drug design”, pioneered in the last century by companies like Vertex. Over the last decades, CADD had great influence on the way new therapeutics are discovered, however, it also showed limitations due to modest accuracy of computational tools.  

The majority of software tools used for computational chemistry and biology rely on molecular mechanics -- a simplified representation of molecules, essentially reducing them down to “balls and sticks”: atoms and bonds between them. In this way it is easier to compute, but accuracy suffers greatly.

In order to gain adequate accuracy, one has to account for the electronic behavior of atoms and molecules, i.e. consider subatomic particles -- electrons and protons. This is what quantum mechanical (QM) methods are all about -- and the theory is not new, dating back to the early decades of the 20th century.  

Chemical data management is an important process to a number of industries, especially those engaged in manufacturing or research and development.  Unfortunately, chemical data is as unwieldy to manage as it is important.  This is for a variety of reasons, but the biggest contributing factor is the sheer amount of data available to the public and managed by an enterprise.  For decades, chemical data has been recorded in paper, and then excel sheets, and now databases.  While efforts have been made to homogenize, or at least centralize this data, there is not one single solution for indexing and searching the wide variety of data types, and sources, managed by an individual enterprise.  Chemchart Enterprise changes this paradigm by combining the flexibility of big data with the precision of machine learning, providing a single solution for managing the entire organization chemical space.

The newly organized research project “MELLODDY” (Machine Learning Ledger Orchestration for Drug Discovery), involving ten large pharma companies and seven technology providers, is that kind of deals which can catalyze a transition of the pharmaceutical industry to a new level -- a “paradigm shift”, as one might refer to it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

The project aims at developing a state-of-the-art platform for collaboration, based on Owkin’s blockchain architecture technology, which would allow collective training of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms using data from multiple direct pharmaceutical competitors, without exposing their internal know-hows and compromising their intellectual property -- for the collective benefit of everyone involved. 

In this Special Perspective, our fourth in an ongoing series, we will be presenting MatchMaker™, a novel deep proteome screening technology that we have developed and validated over the past 2 years to identify DTIs. MatchMaker builds on Cyclica’s passions of combining protein, chemistry, and genomic data, and augmenting it with high performance computing and algorithm development supported on the cloud.