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.

The German billionaires behind BioNTech have found a new vaccine project to back.

Through their family office Athos Service, twin brothers Thomas and Andreas Strüngmann are leading a $25 million private placement into Switzerland’s AC Immune — which concurrently announced that it’s shelling out $58.7 million worth of stock to acquire Affiris’ portfolio of therapies targeting alpha-synuclein, including a vaccine candidate, for Parkinson’s disease.

Editor’s note: Interested in following biopharma’s fast-paced IPO market? You can bookmark our IPO Tracker here.

In a week that’s expected to see several biotechs price their IPOs, Candel Therapeutics got things kicked off Tuesday with a muted opener.

The company helmed by former GlaxoSmithKline vet Paul Peter Tak made its way to Nasdaq thanks to a $72 million raise, which was downsized by about 15% than originally anticipated, according to Renaissance Capital. Candel priced at $8 per share after initially seeking to launch in the $13 to $15 range.

As public and private companies stare down the reality of the Delta variant, many are now requiring that their employees or students be vaccinated against Covid-19 prior to attending school or to returning or starting a new job. Claims that such mandates are illegal or cannot be used for vaccines under emergency use authorizations have now been dismissed.

Setting the record straight, the Department of Justice on Monday called the mandates legal in a new memo, even when used for people with vaccines that remain subject to EUAs.