Every Cure and BioPhy launch partnership on drug repurposing

Steven Loeb · May 1, 2024 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/5879

EveryCure will leverage BioLogicAI, BioPhy’s predictive AI engine, to assess drug-disease matches

Every Cure is a non-profit that looks to identify new uses for existing drugs and conduct clinical trials of the most promising treatments, while BioPhy is a company that utilizes AI to accelerate the development of the most promising drug candidates.

The two companies operate on different points on the drug development spectrum, but now they've decided to team up, announcing a partnership in which EveryCure will leverage BioLogicAI, BioPhy’s predictive AI engine, which offers tailored insights to aid companies through all stages of drug development.

The two companies will work together to assess drug-disease matches and drug repurposing opportunities, while focusing on simulating and optimizing clinical trials and endpoints.

"Every Cure, as a nonprofit, focuses on repurposing FDA-approved drugs to find additional uses, while BioPhy concentrates on drugs still in development, determining their optimal future applications. This creates a powerful synergy, as both of our goals align towards maximizing patient benefits," Grant Mitchell, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO of Every Cure, told VatorNews.

"The technology we use, particularly the artificial intelligence that identifies patterns within global biomedical data, is quite similar across both old and new molecules. This similarity is what excites us about our partnership, as it holds significant promise for advancing patient care."

BioPhy and Every Cure connected through their shared mission of wanting to accelerate the drug development process and get treatments to patients faster, explained Dave Latshaw, CEO and co-founder of BioPhy.

"We were impressed by Every Cure's bold vision of repurposing existing drugs to treat every disease possible. Their non-profit, open-source approach aligned well with our goal of using AI to make drug development more efficient and less costly," he said.

"We saw a great opportunity to combine BioPhy's AI technology, BioLogicAI, for preclinical feasibility analysis and clinical trial simulation with Every Cure's comprehensive drug and disease datasets. Together, we believe we can identify the most promising drug repurposing opportunities and rapidly advance them to benefit patients."

Every Cure, which launched in 2022 in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, has developed an open-source data engine, called MATRIX, to generate predictive efficacy scores for all 3,000 drugs against all 20,000 diseases and advance treatments to patients.

In partnership with academia, industry, and government, Every Cure integrates proprietary and public data into a dataset that optimizes AI ranking algorithms. A pilot study conducted by Every Cure uncovered 106 promising drug repurposing opportunities in the first 147 diseases.

Meanwhile, BioPhy’s AI operating system for drug development consists of two products, the first being BioPhyRx, a generative AI solution designed to create a centralized, intuitive research environment for accessing scientific and regulatory resources. It uses large language models to help pharmaceutical companies by analyzing and interpreting scientific literature, clinical trials, regulatory guidelines and submissions, and other industry specific sources to provide accurate and up-to-date information on demand. 

The second product is BioLogicAI, its predictive AI engine that provides customized insights to aid life science companies through the drug development process, including clinical trial endpoint predictability, indication selection, licensing, drug repurposing, asset acquisitions, and divestment.

For example, a pharma company that has developed a new drug will want to differentiate themselves from competitors. The BioPhy platform is able to put them in a very transparent light relative to those other other drugs by quantifying the efficacy, quantifying the pathways that the drugs act through, and their feasibility in clinical trials and in people.

Over the past 27 months, BioPhy’s technology has accurately predicted the outcomes of over 2,000 clinical trials with an 80% success rate.

Every Cure will use BioPhy's technology in three ways; first, to enhance computational drug repurposing. The companies will work together on creating public benchmark datasets and knowledge graphs, as well as refining ranking algorithms for improved identification of drug repurposing opportunities.

"By combining Every Cure's expertise with BioPhy's already developed computational capabilities, they aim to enhance the speed and accuracy of finding promising drug repurposing candidates," said Latshaw.

Second, it will allow for clinical trial simulation and optimization, allowing Every Cure to pressure test repurposing hypotheses before they commit to clinical trials, which are costly, thereby helping the company to prioritize promising opportunities. Finally, the two companies will share methodologies and insights, including techniques for biomedical graph construction, node featurization, prediction methodologies, and other aspects of AI-driven drug repurposing.

"By leveraging BioPhy's proven approaches, Every Cure can avoid common pitfalls and accelerate the maturation of its own platform," Latshaw said. 

Since launching in November, BioPhy has started commercializing its technology and is now partnering with large and small companies in the life sciences industry, while BioPhy entered pilot and commercial agreements with several pharmaceutical companies and worked with biotech companies from rare diseases to novel cancer therapies. 

While Latshaw wouldn't disclose any numbers, he would say that BioPhy's technology has "experienced rapid adoption," and that the numbers of organizations using the platform has more than doubled in recent months.

Going forward, BioPhy will focus on continuing to enhance the predictive power and generative capabilities of its BioLogicAI platform by integrating new datasets and advancing its AI/ML approaches, with the mission of transforming the way promising drugs are identified and developed in order to improve patient outcomes, which is what it hopes to achieve in this new partnership.

"We're thrilled about the potential of our partnership with Every Cure to get treatments to patients faster by breaking down silos and leveraging AI in innovative ways. It really showcases the art of the possible when mission-driven organizations collaborate. We applaud Every Cure's commitment to open science and data sharing, and we are happy to be a part of their mission," said Latshaw. 

"The combination of Every Cure's non-profit, patient-centric model with BioPhy's cutting-edge, commercially validated AI platform is quite unique. We believe it will become a model for how to drive more equitable and efficient drug repurposing. The fact that this partnership was established on the heels of Every Cure securing a major ARPA-H contract is a strong validation of the approach and its potential impact for patients. We're excited to play a key role in this important work."

(Image source: news-medical.net)

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