The face of drug discovery is rapidly changing with the introduction of new enabling technologies that have the potential to dramatically speed scientific advances and significantly lower the costs of developing new medicines. Join Alex Zhavoronkov PhD, Founder and CEO of InSilico Medicine, and Martin Immanuel Bittner MD DPhil, CEO of Arctoris, for a roundtable discussion on the future of drug discovery using AI/ML, big data, and automation technologies. We will discuss how these two entrepreneurs see the interface of engineering and medicine influencing the biopharma industry, and how their companies are working together to improve the way new therapeutics are created.
Speakers: Martin-Immanuel Bittner MD DPhil, CEO of Arctoris, and Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder & CEO of InSilico Medicine
About the Speakers:
Martin-Immanuel Bittner MD DPhil is the CEO of Arctoris, the world’s first fully automated drug discovery platform. He graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Freiburg in Germany, followed by his DPhil in Oncology as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford. Martin-Immanuel Bittner has extensive research experience covering both clinical trials and preclinical drug discovery and is an active member of several leading cancer research organisations, including EACR, AACR, and ESTRO. In recognition of his research achievements, he was elected a member of the Young Academy of the German National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery, biomarker development. He is also the founder and CEO of Deep Longevity, Inc, a global company developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity. Since 2015, he has invented critical technologies in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) for generation of novel molecular structures with the desired properties and generation of synthetic biological and patient data. Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, and Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012, he has published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers and 2 books. He is also an adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
About Their Companies:
Arctoris
Founded in Oxford in 2016, Arctoris is the world’s first fully automated drug discovery platform. A global team of biotech and pharma veterans and leading engineers developed and operate the company’s proprietary technology platform. Arctoris is the next step in drug discovery data generation, offering fully automated Experiments-as-a-Service. Arctoris is trusted by biotech and AI-driven drug discovery companies, pharmaceutical corporations and academic centres on three continents to bring new drugs from idea to IND. Website: https://arctoris.com.
Insilico Medicine:
Since 2014, Insilico Medicine has focused on generative models, reinforcement learning (RL), and other modern machine learning techniques for the generation of new molecular structures with the specified parameters, generation of synthetic biological data, target identification, and prediction of clinical trials outcomes. Since its inception, Insilico Medicine has raised over $52 million from expert biopharmaceutical and technology investors, published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers, applied for over 25 patents, generated millions in revenue from partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, and received multiple industry awards. Website: www.insilico.com.
About the Workshop Series: This series of workshops is for early-stage life science founders from the Harvard Innovation Labs ecosystem. The workshop will focus specifically on business development, commercialization strategy, and product development strategy for life sciences and healthcare markets. Topics will include prioritization of indications/applications, competitor landscape analyses, intellectual property strategy, regulatory & payer/reimbursement strategy, partnerships & alliances with industry, and venture financing & fundraising strategy. The workshop will bring together founders in an informal setting with leaders from life science startups, industry, and venture capital for group discussions on these different topics. The series will include ‘homework’ given to the founders, which will then be shared and discussed with the group as a means to gain feedback and insights into other founder’s learning experiences. The workshop series will also serve the purpose of promoting a strong sense of community among the founders, allowing them to help one another through the challenges experienced as early-stage life science founders.
