[INTERVIEW] Insilico Medicine aims to reverse aging and cure cancer — all using AI

Industry

Published: 21 Feb. 2024, 07:01 Updated: 21 Feb. 2024, 13:09

[INTERVIEW] Insilico Medicine aims to reverse aging and cure cancer — all using AI

Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilco Medicine [INSILICO MEDICINE]

SAN FRANCISCO — While generative AI is being hailed as a game-changer as it sweeps the globe, the concept of “in silico medicine,” or computational medicine, is not exactly a new one. AI has been driving breakthroughs in the pharmaceutical industry for some time. But a make-or-break question looms large over these AI-driven drug discovery companies; will they ever be able to bring a tangible, market-ready drug to the world?

At the forefront of this increasingly narrowing race runs Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong- and New York-based AI drug development startup. The company is holding the pole position, having developed the world's first fully AI-built drug to enter human clinical trials.

“The industry has clearly changed in our field,” noted Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on the sidelines of the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in early January in San Francisco, California.

The Latvian Canadian scientist, a pioneering figure in generative biology and aging research, found that “AI became a much more serious discussion topic,” during this year's conference. “You see major industry consolidation in AI,” he said.

Insilico Medicine has raised $400 million since its founding in 2014. Its INS018_055, a chronic lung disease treatment candidate, has been undergoing phase 2 clinical trials in China and the United States since June of last year.

It is the world’s first-ever small-molecule drug candidate built by AI from the very beginning to enter a clinical trial on human patients, meaning that generative AI technology discovered and designed the molecule from scratch.

Insilico Medicine's pipelines as of February, displayed on the company's website [INSILICO MEDICINE]

Insilico utilizes its AI models in disease target identification, the generation of novel molecule data and predicting the results of clinical trials. The company had some 30 pipelines under development as of this January.

While ChatGPT’s splashy debut has triggered a global tech race for large-scale generative AI models, generative AI is not a new concept.

Zhavoronkov presented on stage at the Korea Future Forum in 2017, arguing that the technology would be the next “big thing,” during one of his many visits to the country over the past few years.

Audiences back then barely bat an eye.

Fast-forward to 2024. Generative AI is, indeed, changing the world — and deeper below the surface, the AI-driven biotech industry has already gone through a relatively quiet restructuring.

The market has contracted “from 1,000 companies out there to maybe four or five,” in Zhavoronkov's estimate. “So a lot of companies just died or became very quiet, because what matters now is how many drugs you produce using your AI platform.”

What makes an AI drug discovery company successful, therefore, often boils down to a single question: “Where is your pipeline?”

“Investors will say, ‘Show me the future — in the next, let's say, four or five years, are you going to develop a drug?’” said the CEO.

“And if you fail to get into human clinical trials, pharmaceutical companies do not believe you anymore; they don't believe that this AI is real.”

Zhavoronkov stressed that AI in the pharmaceutical industry is different from those of other fields because “in drug discovery, AI cannot be tested using human intelligence.”

Other industries that leverage AI can validate the technology comparatively easily and quickly. In the biopharmaceutical sector, the basic validation of a model can take at least six months and half a million dollars, according to Zhavoronkov.

Major pharma players have begun to pay even bigger attention to Insilico Medicine with its phase 2 clinical asset, the CEO noted during several business meetings in San Francisco.

Insilico Medicine announced a potentially $500 million global exclusive license agreement for a breast cancer treatment candidate with Menarini Group on Jan. 4, ahead of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The company also out-licensed its cancer treatment with an upfront of $80 million to Exelixis last September.

The firm come out on the other end due to its dual-pronged management team spearheaded by two co-CEOs.

While Zhavoronkov is in charge of AI, drug discovery is handled by Feng Ren, the co-CEO and chief scientific officer with a background in chemistry and small molecule drug development.

“I think the ideal pilot for a company that does AI drug discovery is somebody who came from pharma into a contract research organization and had to actually perform services for many others to [enable] tests, and who has the capability to build a testing vehicle and bridge this discovery capability with AI with the ability to validate,” he said, citing such leadership structure as Insilico’s “main competitive advantage.”

Addressing potential geopolitical volatility rooted in U.S.-China decoupling concerns, Zhavoronkov expressed confidence in the industry’s relative resilience against political turmoil.

“I don’t think geopolitics will touch us as much because I think biotechnology is the last straw that keeps the world together,” said the CEO.

Insilico Medicine has been running multiple global operations across the globe to mitigate possible risks as well.

While the firm first came to be in Baltimore the company is currently headquartered in Hong Kong and New York City and has operations in Montreal; Shanghai, China; Suzhou, China; and Abu Dhabi.

Insilico Medicine opened an AI-driven, fully automated robotics laboratory in Suzhou last January and switched on the Insilico Medicine Generative Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing Research and Development Center in Abu Dhabi, the largest AI-powered biotechnology research center in the Middle East, in February of that year.

In 2024, the company is making strides on the first quantum computer-generated drug molecules and already has “synthesized and tested” some, according to Zhavoronkov.

But his ultimate goal is to “find algorithms that will help you reverse aging.”

“We actually go after aging as a disease,” said Zhavoronkov, adding that AI is a great tool for following a person’s physiological and psychological changes over time, and that a big enough volume of data may give insight into the general biology behind the way the human body ages and develops diseases until the time of death.

Just like how Apple’s iPhone, a technology unimaginable before its debut, has now become accessible across the planet, Zhavoronkov believes that the biotechnology to reverse aging will eventually become accessible to a wider population.

“I think that technology will make the world so much better,” the scientist stressed.

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]