Sean McClain, Co-Founder and CEO of AbSci.
There has been a lot of recent attention on the challenges of delivering COVID-19 vaccines. But there are also challenges in making them. For some of the newer options like those from Johnson & Johnson and Oxford-AstraZeneca, the modified cells used in vaccine production are struggling under the scale of demand. But synthetic biology company AbScis recent acquisition of the artificial intelligence platform, Denovium, could help mitigate this type of challenge in the future.
Unlike mRNA vaccines, the Johnson & Johnson/Oxford-AstraZeneca class of vaccines rely on a type of virus called adenovirus which is known to cause colds in chimpanzees. To address COVID-19, the adenovirus is genetically altered to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein which is what ultimately triggers the bodys immune response. Like mRNA vaccines, adenovirus-based vaccines train the body to recognize and fight COVID-19, foregoing the need to inject a person with a weakened version of SARS-CoV-2.
But producing enough adenovirus cells has been a challenge. To make vaccine doses, large volumes of altered adenovirus are produced by replicating cells in bioreactors. But, the scale of production can also cause the cells to weaken. This can result in a reduced output of adenovirus copies. So while these new vaccines may represent a breakthrough in adenovirus-based therapeutics, the process also highlights some critical roadblocks.
One major issue is that drug discovery and drug manufacturing are often disconnected from one another. Drug discovery typically starts with screeningthe process of finding a set of compounds out of 100,000 combinations that can best neutralize a targeted weak point of a disease. But when a promising protein is identified, it often turns out to be difficult to scale effectively.
Once a therapeutic compound is identified, researchers must then determine if it works well with a group of similar cells called a cell-line. By inserting the compound into the cellswhich then divide and multiply in a bioreactorthe cells act like factories to produce greater volumes of the compound of choice. But, as in the case with adenovirus-producing cells, not all cells can maintain their functions at large volumes. If the protein compound doesnt work well in a scalable cell-line, researchers often have to go back to the drawing board to find a new compound and start again.
Many in the biopharma space are aware of this inefficient process. The synthetic biology company AbSci has spent years developing a platform solution that streamlines the workflow. [Our platform] is simultaneously a drug discovery and manufacturing platform that allows you to discover your drug and the cell line that can manufacture [it], says AbSci CEO, Sean McClain. Were finally uniting drug discovery and manufacturing the first time.
AbSci refers to their core process as their Protein Printing platform, not because it uses ink and paper to make proteins but as an analogy for ease and speed. The first technology [in our platform] is our SoluPro E. coli strain. It has been highly engineered to be more mammalian-like to be able to produce mammalian-like proteins that E. coli wasn't previously capable of doing, says McClain. AbSci also uses what the company calls a folding solution to precisely tailor how proteins fold and therefore function.
Imad Ajjawi, Co-Founder and CBO of Denovium
To find the most effective protein, AbSci alters its folding solutions to create as many protein varieties as possible, often to the order of 10s of millions. The more protein types available, which AbSci refers to as libraries, the higher the likelihood of success. But this also creates a challenge: so many options, but which to choose?
To address this, AbSci recently acquired artificial intelligence company, Denovium. By integrating Denoviums AI platform, AbSci can improve its data analysis via AI models. From there, the company can take the best candidates and find the most effective cell-line to produce the chosen compounds at scale. McClain explains that traditional drug discovery and manufacturing typically takes years. But AbScis platform can take that timeline down to weeks. Were actually able to manufacture [therapeutics] because the dirty secret in pharma is that so many drugs get shelved because [pharma companies] can't actually manufacture them, says McClain.
For McClain, acquiring Denovium is a big step forward for AbScis discovery process. Its going to change the paradigm. Its really a perfect marriage of both data and AI technology. If you don't have good data feeding into your AI model, it's worthless. But if you don't have an AI technology, you can't mine [the data] and get all the benefits, says McClain.
Denoviums co-founder and CBO, Imad Ajjawi, also sees the new collaboration as a significant opportunity. It's really exciting to be a part of AbSci because they have all the data, billions of points that the deep learning engine can now analyze, says Ajjawi. AbScis acquisition also comes on the heels of the companys $65 million Series E in late 2020.
Upgrading the union of biology and AI is important for advancing synthetic biology innovation. But the true potential beneficiaries of this advanced discovery platform are those in need of novel drug options.
AbScis main goal as a company is to bring therapeutics to market more quickly. This technology's impact on healthcare is profound because more drugs and biologics can now enter patients' hands faster, says McClain.
McClain believes that AbScis technology will help speed the process of clinically testing new medications. Faster clinical trial turnarounds could increase the number of drugs approved to address a range of diseases. This could be most impactful for patients with rare or difficult to treat conditions as drug discovery is often prioritized based on how long it takes to find a scalable cell-line.
But though AbSci is working to accelerate drug discovery, the process still takes time. Right now, we have six drugs that are in preclinical or clinical trials. And one of them is actually in phase three. So we could have an improved product here in the next couple of years, says McClain.
As Absci and Denovium finalize their technology integrations, McClain is also looking ahead to build as many partnerships as possible. The more partnerships we do, the more patients were able to affect that at the end of the day, says McClain.
In line with that goal, AbSci today announced a continuation of its partnership with Astellas and Xyphos. AbSci will take on screening and identifying an optimal cell-line for a leading variant of Xyphos MicAbody, a bispecific antibody-like adaptor molecule used in the company's immuno-oncology program.
McClain expects more partnership announcements will follow in the first quarter of 2021. We have some really exciting partnerships that are going to be coming out over this next quarter that I think speak to the [range] of the types of disease states we're working on and the breadth of how the technology can be used within biopharma, says McClain.
Im the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies that I write about are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest, including AbSci. Thank you to Fiona Mischel and Vinit Parekh for additional research and reporting in this article.
Read this article:
Synthetic Biology Startup Acquires AI Platform To Disrupt The Drug Industry - Forbes
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]