BioMed X Institute Starts Its First Research Project With Sanofi on Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development

Powered by Sanofi, a new BioMed X research team will develop a computational platform designed to accelerate drug development.

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2023 / BioMed X, a German independent research institute, announces the start of its first research project in collaboration with Sanofi: "Next Generation Virtual Patient Engine for Clinical Translation of Drug Candidates" (VPE). The end goal of this research project is to develop a versatile computational platform that can predict the efficacy of first- or best-in-class drug candidates in virtual patient populations at unprecedented accuracy, thereby addressing one of the most critical bottlenecks of the pharmaceutical industry today: a 90% failure rate of new drug candidates during clinical development.

The new research team will be led by Dr. Douglas McCloskey, a scientist and entrepreneur jointly selected by the Sanofi and BioMed X Institute management for the group leader position. "Most drug candidates that fail during clinical development do so due to a lack of efficacy compared to the standard of care. Our mission is to develop a platform to test-drive drug development candidates in virtual patients to gate the best ones into the clinic," explained the newly-appointed group leader of team VPE. "To tackle this challenge, our team at BioMed X will push the frontier of in silico drug discovery and development using our AI expertise with coaching from our industry partners," added Dr. McCloskey.

Christian Tidona, Founder and Managing Director of the BioMed X Institute: "After two years of collaborating on AI-powered drug discovery and development projects with our strategic partner in Israel, AION Labs, we are now ready to start our first AI-based research team in Heidelberg, Germany, together with our new pharma partner, Sanofi."

The "Next Generation Virtual Patient Engine for Clinical Translation of Drug Candidates" (VPE) team joins eight other active research teams at the BioMed X Institute in Germany, and it is one of four new projects launched by BioMed X in 2023. To learn more about this new AI-based research group, visit the BioMed X Institute website at www.bio.mx.

About BioMed X

BioMed X is an independent research institute located on the campus of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, with a worldwide network of partner locations. Together with our partners, we identify big biomedical research challenges and provide creative solutions by combining global crowdsourcing with local incubation of the world's brightest early-career research talents. Each of the highly diverse research teams at BioMed X has access to state-of-the-art research infrastructure and is continuously guided by experienced mentors from academia and industry. At BioMed X, we combine the best of two worlds - academia and industry - and enable breakthrough innovation by making biomedical research more efficient, more agile, and more fun.

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SOURCE: BioMed X Institute