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- At the "Ageing Societies 2016," The Economist conference in London, LongeVC and Insilico Medicine entered into a research collaboration
- LongeVC is a new venture fund investing in companies developing drugs and other interventions to cure or prevent age-related diseases with a mission to extend healthy human longevity
- Over 90% of small molecules that pass pre-clinical validation fail in clinical trials
- Insilico Medicine is one of the leaders in applying artificial intelligence and advanced pathway activation analysis techniques to predict the efficacy and safety of small molecules and the outcomes of clinical trials
- LongeVC will utilize Insilico expertise to identify projects with high probability of passing the clinical trials and maximizing the longevity dividend
Wednesday, 30th of November, Baltimore, MD - Insilico Medicine today announced a research collaboration with LongeVC, a venture fund dedicated to investing in companies targeting aging and age-related diseases. In the scope of this collaboration, Insilico Medicine's signaling pathway-based analytical methods and deep learned predictors will be used to evaluate the efficacy, adverse effects, and population-specificity of small molecules, antibodies, gene therapy, and other interventions.
The parties entered into a research collaboration at the "Ageing Societies 2016" conference organized by The Economist, one of the most reputable journals in the field (for more information, see: http://www.economist.com/events-conferences/emea/ageing-societies).
"The percentage of the elderly population in developed countries is rapidly increasing and presents a major growth opportunity for businesses focused on increasing productive longevity, as well as treating and preventing age-related diseases. But identifying the winning technologies requires complex screening methods, so we partnered with one of the leaders in biomarker development and aging research to perform quality control and to assess the effectiveness of anti-aging interventions. We are aiming to identify projects that make the most impact and have a reasonably high probability of success. At the end of the day, everything we own, we rent for the length of our lifetime, and investing in longevity is one of the ways to maximize the value of our assets," said Garri Zmudze, managing partner at LongeVC.
Insilico Medicine developed a portfolio of deep learned and parametric biomarkers of human aging utilizing simple blood biochemistry tests (for more information, see: http://www.Aging.AI), blood-derived and tissue-specific gene expression data, and imaging data. These biomarkers are essential for assessing the relevance of experiments performed on animals.
"When evaluating interventions related to aging and age-related diseases, it is important to have biologically-relevant biomarkers of aging that work in humans. The ability to backtest some of the interventions on retrospective data is very appealing. LongeVC is the first fund focused on longevity research, and we welcome this collaboration with Insilico Medicine, one of the most established players in bioinformatics and longevity science," said Fred Khodorov, CFP®, senior pharmaceutical and healthcare consultant, and advisor to LongeVC.
Insilico Medicine's in silico Pathway Activation Network Decomposition Analysis ("iPANDA") technique, recently published in Nature Communications, doi:10.1038/ncomms13427 (for more information, see: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13427), will be applied to projects where transcriptomic or proteomic data is available to analyze pathway-level effects of interventions. DeepPharma™ clinical trials scoring engine will be used to predict the outcomes of the Phase I (safety) and Phase II (efficacy) clinical trials. The scoring engine has already demonstrated proof of concept of using Deep Neural Networks ("DNNs") to predict the pharmacological properties of many drugs.
Insilico Medicine's HedgePharma system, which predicts the outcomes of Phase II clinical trials, is a by-product of a massive backtesting project, where scientists working on predictive modeling analyzed almost all clinical trials and linked them to stock prices of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to understand if some of the clinical trials failed or succeeded when outcome measures were unclear. This system is now used by some venture funds and hedge funds to make investment decisions in biomedicine.
"We are very happy to collaborate with LongeVC, an emerging venture fund intended to address one of the most pressing challenges of our time - aging, by investing in companies developing therapies that may extend human productive longevity. It is a pleasure to see that more and more smart investors are moving into the field of longevity science. I hope that other venture funds, hedge funds, and portfolio managers will utilize our expertise in omics-informed clinical trials risk estimates and our experience in analyzing the longevity dividend in terms of the productivity-adjusted life years ("PALY") of potential investment projects," said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.
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About LongeVC
LongeVC is a next generation venture fund focusing on high-impact investments in biotechnology and healthcare companies developing therapeutic interventions or enabling technologies that have a chance to result in complete cures of major age-related diseases and producing maximum longevity dividends. The company is founded by a team of experts in information technology, pharmaceutical industry, telecommunications, and finance.
Company website: http://www.longevc.com. Contact: hq@longevc.com.
About Insilico Medicine, Inc.
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore with Research and Development ("R&D") resources in Belgium, Russia, and Poland hiring talent through hackathons and competitions. The company utilizes advances in genomics, big data analysis, and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company pursues internal drug discovery programs in cancer, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, sarcopenia, and geroprotector discovery. Through its Pharma.AI division, the company provides advanced machine learning services to biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and skin care companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8.