Nvidia Backed Iambic AI ‘Enchant’ Aims to Slash Drug Discovery Costs
Supported by Nvidia, Iambic Therapeutics introduces ‘Enchant,’ a ground-breaking AI model designed to speed up and reduce drug discovery expenses.
Iambic Therapeutics, a biotech company, showed off a groundbreaking artificial intelligence model on Tuesday. This model could make it much easier and cheaper to make new drugs.
More and more tech startups use AI to help pharmaceutical research progress. Iambic, a company that has received funding from the tech giant Nvidia, shared information about its brand-new AI drug discovery model, which it calls “Enchant.”
Preclinical data, derived from lab-based drug tests before human testing, provided a wealth of knowledge for Enchant. The model aims to predict the early stages of a drug’s development. Iambic published a white paper in which Enchant showed a high level of accuracy in predicting how well the human body would absorb certain drugs. We compared the results with real-world events.
With a prediction score of 0.74, the company said its model set a new standard. Early models, on the other hand, had only gotten as high as 0.58. Fred Manby, co-founder, and chief technology officer of Iambic, told Reuters that researchers who use Enchant might be able to cut in half the amount of money they need to spend on developing some drugs because they can see early on how successful a drug is likely to be.
“People often estimate that getting a product to market costs around $2 billion, but a significant portion is not due to the program’s costs, but rather to the frequent failures.” “The costs of getting a product from the idea stage to a medicine on the market come from the high chance of failure in the late stages,” he said. “It’s possible to cut costs in half by improving things by 10% at each stage of clinical development.”
Major AI Breakthrough in Drug Discovery
French chemist and 2018 Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold, who is on the board of Iambic, told Reuters that the new development was a big step forward in using AI to find new drugs. Arnold compared Enchant to Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold program, the creators of which recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as it solved a different problem in the drug discovery process.
“AlphaFold predicts the 3D structure of how a molecule binds to a protein target, but the structure is not enough,” she noted. “The pharmacokinetic, efficacy, and toxicity properties of a drug candidate determine how well it works.” “Enchant takes on these unique and important problems.”
