AI healthcare upstart Aladdin continues to develop best-in-class AI technologies to advance and accelerate new breakthroughs in drug discovery.
In October 2020, UK-based healthcare technology developer Aladdin successfully released its commercial proprietary Artificial Intelligence Drug Discovery (AIDD) platform, aimed at accelerating the drug development process. The automated machine-learning platform pipeline covers all the main stages of early drug discovery:
- Virtual screening;
- Hit to lead, also known as lead generation;
- Lead optimisation; and
- The pre-clinical phase.
With its proprietary platform, Aladdin has already identified and optimised multiple small molecule drug compounds with high potential for age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). Prior to the launch of its AIDD platform, Aladdin was able to leverage its Knowledge Graph to identify that the steroid dexamethasone could be used to relieve COVID-19 symptoms in March 2020, before anyone else. Dexamethasone was then reported by the BBC as a potential drug candidate for treating COVID-19 in June. The results have been published in the leading AI conference, BIOKDD.
The discovery and development process for a new drug is extremely long, expensive and challenging; and takes an average of 10 to 15 years. The average success rate, which is only 10% for each drug discovery process, is extremely low. Due to the long development period and low success rate, the development cost for a single drug has risen significantly to $2.6bn. The commercial returns for pharmaceutical companies have dropped from 10% in 2008 to around 2% in 2018. Based on the research report from Deloitte, AI-assisted drug discovery is the most promising solution for this dilemma.
The early discovery phase of the drug discovery process represents the largest portion (33%) of its total development cost. The recent breakthroughs in AI have demonstrated its potential for the pharmaceutical industry. By embedding data into a high-dimensional space and extracting key relationships, AI provides innovative solutions for all stages of early drug discovery. The market size of AI-enabled drug discovery is projected to reach $1.43bn by 2024, with an annual increase of 40.8%.
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