AstraZeneca is once again teaming up with Hungarian artificial intelligence specialist Turbine as it looks to speed up and gain deeper insights into its antibody-drug conjugate discovery process.
AstraZeneca is going all in on ADCs, making them a core element of its oncology strategy. The British Big Pharma has already helped turn ADC Enhertu into a blockbuster and then followed that up with the FDA approval of another ADC, Datroway.
Both drugs emerged from a collaboration with Japanese pharma Daiichi Sankyo, but AstraZeneca has made no secret of its desire to push on internally with ADC development.
Now, it’s turning to Turbine for help. The collab, the financial details of which were not disclosed, will see AZ test the ability of Turbine’s platform to “rationalize” ADC discovery by “predicting response mechanisms, informing ADC positioning, and reducing the need for large-scale cell line screens,” according to a statement.
Turbine’s platform virtualizes biological experiments at scale, and the European company said it aims to “not only improve the efficiency and speed of ADC discovery but also deliver mechanistic insights that current experimental screening approaches may typically lack.”
ADCs work as targeted medicines that aim to deliver chemotherapy agents directly to cancer cells via a linker attached to a monoclonal antibody. The discovery process can, however, be slowed by the need to find the most effective payloads across many different tumor types and patient populations.
This typically means scaling through high-cost, large-scale screening of hundreds of cell lines and patient-derived xenografts.
Turbine believes it can help with its so-called “lab-in-the-loop approach,” where Turbine’s platform recommends cell lines for testing then predicts outcomes using AstraZeneca’s ADC data sets.
“By implementing a lab-in-the-loop approach, we can move beyond broad experimental screening toward a more efficient, targeted strategy that selects the ADC combinations most likely to succeed in patients,” Daniel Veres, M.D., Ph.D., chief scientific officer and co-founder of Turbine, said in a statement.
The pair has a previous pact focused on AZ tapping Turbine’s Simulated Cell platform for resistance to blood cancer therapy as well as DNA damage repair mechanisms.
AstraZeneca has had a busy week with AI drug discovery deals. Monday, the company unveiled a collaboration worth up to $555 million with Algen Biotechnologies that'll see the San Francisco biotech use its AI platform to boost discovery of new targets in immunology.