Innovate UK providing £1m funding for AI research project

Optibrium is a company that creates software to improve the productivity and efficiency of drug discovery, and Intellegens is a company that has worked on a specific form of AI called deep learning. These two companies and Medicines Discovery Catapult are set to collaborate for the next two years on an artificial intelligence research project which will see them develop an AI drug discovery platform for use under license. The point of this project is to address the issue that 90% of potential drugs are dropped between phase 1 trials and regulatory approval, which has a financial impact on the ability to develop new medicines. The collaboration will attempt to use AI to get a deeper understanding of complex data and learn from it so they can improve the success rate of potential new medicines with enhanced design and testing methods.
Chief informatics officer of the Medicines Discovery Catapult, Professor John Overington, said: “At Medicines Discovery Catapult we apply innovation, working alongside UK SMEs to drive the development and adoption of new approaches for the discovery and early development of new medicines. This collaborative R&D activity will allow us to do just that and the grant from Innovate UK represents an important milestone for the advancement of informatics and data science.”