Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage, end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, is designing new non-hormonal contraceptive options for women using its AI platform with support from a grant of over $700,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Petrina Kamya, PhD, Head of AI Platforms at Insilico Medicine, participated in the foundation’s Fall 2022 Non-hormonal Contraceptive Discovery Convening and Grand Challenges Annual Meeting Oct. 22-27 in Brussels.
“We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to use our AI drug discovery and design platform to help design new birth control options for women across the world, which represents a major unmet need,” says Dr. Kamya.
Using its Pharma.AI platform, Insilico will develop completely new small molecules to further interrogate and evaluate targets that could possibly lead to a contraceptive effect. The platform will optimize molecules with desirable properties such as potency, synthetic accessibility, specificity, and metabolic stability in order to have the highest likelihood of success.
More than 200 million women and girls in low- and middle-income countries who want to avoid pregnancy aren’t using a modern method of contraception, according to the World Health Organization, and nearly 40 percent of women who begin using shorter-acting contraception stop within the first year because they are not comfortable with the methods available. The foundation notes that efforts to develop new contraceptive technologies have been chronically underfunded.
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, is connecting biology, chemistry, and clinical trials analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques for novel target discovery and the generation of novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is developing breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system diseases, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and aging-related diseases.
Website: www.insilico.com
Contact: media@insilico.com