Powered by Sanofi, a new BioMed X research team will develop a computational platform designed to accelerate drug development.
HEIDELBERG, GERMANY / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2023 / BioMed X, a German independent research institute, announces the start of its first research project in collaboration with Sanofi: “Next Generation Virtual Patient Engine for Clinical Translation of Drug Candidates” (VPE). The end goal of this research project is to develop a versatile computational platform that can predict the efficacy of first- or best-in-class drug candidates in virtual patient populations at unprecedented accuracy, thereby addressing one of the most critical bottlenecks of the pharmaceutical industry today: a 90% failure rate of new drug candidates during clinical development.
The new research team will be led by Dr. Douglas McCloskey, a scientist and entrepreneur jointly selected by the Sanofi and BioMed X Institute management for the group leader position. “Most drug candidates that fail during clinical development do so due to a lack of efficacy compared to the standard of care. Our mission is to develop a platform to test-drive drug development candidates in virtual patients to gate the best ones into the clinic,” explained the newly-appointed group leader of team VPE. “To tackle this challenge, our team at BioMed X will push the frontier of in silico drug discovery and development using our AI expertise with coaching from our industry partners,” added Dr. McCloskey.
Christian Tidona, Founder and Managing Director of the BioMed X Institute: “After two years of collaborating on AI-powered drug discovery and development projects with our strategic partner in Israel, AION Labs, we are now ready to start our first AI-based research team in Heidelberg, Germany, together with our new pharma partner, Sanofi.”
