Bren­dan Frey set out, when he be­gan the project to pick out a lead pro­gram for Deep Ge­nomics, to prove that the ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence sys­tems his lab has de­signed can iden­ti­fy new drug tar­gets and find a win­ning can­di­date much faster than tra­di­tion­al meth­ods. Now that they have ze­roed in on an an­ti­sense oligonu­cleotide ex­on-skip­ping ther­a­py for a sub­type of Wil­son dis­ease — se­lect­ed out of 2,400 ail­ments and 120,000 un­der­ly­ing ge­net­ic mu­ta­tions — as their face case, the Toron­to-based biotech is ready to delve in­to new fron­tiers with their AI tech.

Deep Ge­nomics plans to spend rough­ly half of its new $40 mil­lion on clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of DG12P1, whose first-in-hu­man tri­al is slat­ed for 2021; and the oth­er half on strength­en­ing var­i­ous com­po­nents of its ma­chine learn­ing sys­tems, from ro­bot­ics to as­says. Fu­ture Ven­tures, an in­vestor in Tes­la and SpaceX, led the Se­ries B round while Am­pli­tude Ven­tures, Mag­net­ic Ven­tures, Khosla Ven­tures and True Ven­tures joined.

While they took a splice mod­u­lat­ing ap­proach for their first AI-dis­cov­ered com­pound akin to what Bio­gen has with Spin­raza, Deep Ge­nomics is next fo­cused on hap­loin­suf­fi­cien­cies — dis­or­ders where in­creased ex­pres­sion lev­els of one func­tion­al gene would be valu­able. In oth­er words, where­as the pre­vi­ous chal­lenge lied in find­ing the right mu­ta­tion to tin­ker, the new puz­zle is how best to boost a known tar­get.

It’s a rel­a­tive­ly new ap­pli­ca­tion of oligonu­cleotides with no ap­proved drugs, which is al­so be­ing ex­plored at Stoke Ther­a­peu­tics.

“There are many dif­fer­ent mech­a­nisms that could be rel­e­vant, and so when you look at all these dif­fer­ent mech­a­nisms and all these dif­fer­ent re­gions of the gene that you could de­sign the oli­go for, there are tens of thou­sands, or even hun­dreds of thou­sands of pos­si­ble com­pounds,” says Frey, a star re­searcher that in­sil­i­co’s Alex Zha­voronkov con­sid­ers “with­out doubt in top 10 sci­en­tists in this field in the world.”

Frey elab­o­rates:

That could be in the 5’ UTR, it could be in the in­tron, it could be in an ex­on, in­tron­ic se­quences are very large, could be in a 3’ UTR, dif­fer­ent kinds of mech­a­nisms may be in­volved. It could be a mat­ter of al­ter­ing the up­stream open read­ing frame, or it could be a mat­ter of an in­tron or ten­sion bot­tle neck, it could be a mat­ter of chang­ing the polyadeny­la­tion site, it could be a com­pound that al­ters sec­ondary struc­tures.

New tools will be re­quired to test all these paths they can po­ten­tial­ly trav­el down, and Deep Ge­nomics’ team of 40-plus is al­ready per­fect­ing one mod­el de­signed to pre­dict polyadeny­la­tion pat­terns.

“Mul­ti­lin­gual­ism is an im­por­tant core val­ue for us,” he pre­vi­ous­ly said. “Every­one at the com­pa­ny has had AI train­ing, and every­one at the com­pa­ny has done wet lab work. In fact I ac­tu­al­ly se­quenced the ge­nom­ic DNA for the Wil­son tar­get to val­i­date it once we edit­ed the cell line to put the pa­tient mu­ta­tion in­to the cells.”

In ad­di­tion to deep­en­ing the clin­i­cal bench, Frey is al­so re­cruit­ing for the busi­ness de­vel­op­ment unit.

“Our pipeline is over­flow­ing, and so we’re fo­cused on sign­ing some busi­ness deals,” he tells End­points News in the lead­up to the an­nu­al JP Mor­gan con­fab in San Fran­cis­co.

That in­cludes two ad­di­tion­al pro­grams for Wil­son’s dis­ease that, to­geth­er with the lead pro­gram, would ad­dress up to a quar­ter of the 230,000 pa­tients world­wide. There’s one oth­er undis­closed meta­bol­ic can­di­date for which Frey plans to sub­mit an IND this year, some com­pounds for retinopa­thy, and a dozen hap­loin­suf­fi­cient projects in de­vel­op­ment, he says.

While falling behind the biggest PD-(L)1 drugs in terms of sales, Roche has looked to carve out a space for its Tecentriq with a growing expertise in lung cancer. The drug will now take an early lead in the sought-after adjuvant setting — but competitors are on the way.

The FDA on Friday approved Tecentriq as an adjuvant therapy for patients with Stage II-IIIA non small cell lung cancer with PD-(L)1 scores greater than or equal to 1, making it the first drug of its kind approved in an early setting that covers around 40% of all NSCLC patients.

About five years ago, Amit Etkin had a breakthrough.

The Stanford neurologist, a soft-spoken demi-prodigy who became a professor while still a resident, had been obsessed for a decade with how to better define psychiatric disorders. Drugs for depression or bipolar disorder didn’t work for many patients with the conditions, and he suspected the reason was how traditional diagnoses didn’t actually get at the heart of what was going on in a patient’s brain.

Three new entities priced their public debuts late Thursday and early Friday, including a SPAC, a traditional Nasdaq IPO and a Chinese biotech joining the Hong Kong Index.

Shanghai-based Abbisko Therapeutics raised the most money of the triumvirate, garnering $226 million in its Hong Kong debut and pricing at HK$12.46, or roughly $1.60 in US dollars. The blank check company followed up with a $150 million raise, while MiNK Therapeutics priced on Nasdaq at $12 per share and a $40 million raise.

While a horde of drugmakers develops bispecific antibodies to more directly target tumor cells — there were about 100 programs in or nearing clinical trials back in May — a new company is emerging to go one step further.

On Thursday, Tentarix Biotherapeutics unveiled a $50 million Series A round to support its next-gen multi-specifics platform. While the field has largely focused on bispecifics, which engage two targets, Tentarix believes its multifunctional programs have the potential to be even more specific, since more conditions must be met for potent activity to occur.