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.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

As talk of AI this-and-that gobbles up headline after headline, one Big Pharma is losing its AI leader as she transitions to another drug giant: Iya Khalil will trade in her hat as Novartis’ go-to expert and leader in the space for Merck as VP and head of data, AI and genome sciences next week.

After nearly three years leading the artificial intelligence team at Novartis — as Big Pharma and biotechs alike latch onto the ripening AI-for-drug-discovery mode of operation — Khalil will switch employers to head up a similar post at Merck, where she’ll work out of Cambridge, MA beginning Feb. 13, the company tells Endpoints News.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”