Culmination Bio has secured $10m in investment from the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (venture capital arm of MSD) and Amgen Ventures to develop an intelligence platform to facilitate diagnostic and therapeutic development. The US-based company has a library of multimodal and longitudinal data along with the accompanying biospecimens, Culmination Bio’s CEO Lincoln Nadauld told Pharmaceutical Technology. The data for Culmination’s library consists of de-identified HIPPA-compliant data from Intermountain Health. This allows the company to “identify specific patient cohorts and proactively or prospective rapidly recruit them”, which can accelerate drug discovery and clinical trial recruitment. Nadauld said that having biospecimens is instrumental in validating diagnostic devices, adding: “An example would be a liquid biopsy company validating their novel technology in the liquid biopsy space, for cancer. They often need fresh samples from patients with defined diseases, and we can deliver not only the biospecimens but the accompanying multimodal data that ...
In recent years there has been a downward trend in health care provider (HCP) contact in the pharmaceutical industry with 65% of HCPs limiting access to three or fewer companies, said Aaron Bean, the vice president of commercial business consulting at Veeva Europe. At the Veeva Commercial Summit 2023, Bean discussed HCP engagement with the pharmaceutical sector at a media roundtable. He suggested that HCPs’ increased selectiveness could be a result of increased “time pressure” and changes in the way they consume information. Bean was presenting data from Veeva’s February 2023 Pulse Field Trends Report which showed geographic differences in HCP engagement. In data taken from April to September 2022 from European countries, the UK led the shift with 94% of HCPs only contacting three or fewer pharmaceutical companies, compared to 50% in Spain. The same dataset showed that differences also appeared when comparing therapy areas. In oncology, approximately 25% ...
By Kate Goodwin Pictured: Boehringer Ingelheim building/iStock, Sundry Photography Boehringer Ingelheim is striking a deal to leverage artificial intelligence for some of the hardest to treat cancers. Phenomic AI announced a collaboration agreement with the pharma giant Wednesday. The Toronto and Boston-based biopharma is getting a $9 million upfront payment with another potential $500 million on the line in milestones and royalties to discover targets for stroma-rich cancers. The stroma-rich cancer category is among the most difficult to treat. Including types like colorectal and pancreatic, the tumor stroma in these cancers provides a hard-to-penetrate barrier around the tumor that both protects the cancer and helps feed it. Phenomic’s platform is focused on targets that can break through the stroma to ...
In a new study, artificial intelligence in the form of ChatGPT outperformed an expert rhinoplasty surgeon in answering preoperative and postoperative patient questions related to nasal surgery. ChatGPT earned significantly higher ratings in accuracy, completeness, and overall quality, according to the study published in Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine. Kay Durairaj, MD, and Omer Baker, from Pasadena, California , Dario Bertossi, MD, from University of Verona, Steven Dayan, MD, from University of Illinois, Chicago, Kian Karimi, MD, from Los Angeles California, Roy Kim, MD, from San Francisco, California, Sam Most, MD, from Stanford University, Enrico Robotti, MD, from Bergamo Italy, and Frand Rosengaus, MD, from Mexico City, reported that ChatGPT was overwhelmingly preferred over physician responses, with evaluators favoring ChatGPT in 80.95% of instances. Their findings are presented in the article titled “Artificial Intelligence Versus Expert Plastic Surgeon: Comparative Study Shows ChatGPT ‘Wins’ Rhinoplasty Consultations: Should We Be Worried?” ...
Almirall and Absci have announced a drug discovery partnership aimed at developing and commercialising artificial intelligence (AI)-designed treatments for dermatological diseases, with the deal worth over $650m. The collaboration will combine Almirall’s dermatological capabilities with Absci’s Integrated Drug Creation platform, which the generative AI company says “unlocks the potential to accelerate time to clinic and increase the probability of success by simultaneously optimising multiple drug characteristics important to both development and therapeutic benefit”. Under the terms of the agreement, Absci will apply its de novo generative AI technology to create and commercialise therapeutic candidates for two dermatological targets. In addition to product royalties, Absci is eligible to receive up to approximately $650m in upfront fees, research and development (R&D) and post-approval milestone payments across the two programmes if all milestones are successfully completed. Dr Karl Ziegelbauer, Almirall’s executive vice president of R&D and chief scientific officer, said: “Almirall chose Absci ...
Benjamin Franklin’s saying, “Lost time is never found again” is as applicable today as it was in the 1700s. One of the most important aspects of medical laboratory management is to deliver lab tests within a limited time as they shape approximately two-thirds of all medical decisions made by physicians. As the workforce of lab professionals continues to shrink due to retirement, an increase in demand for services and vacancy rates, real-time insights can play a crucial role in counteracting market forces affecting lab staffing shortages by enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions and take proactive measures to address staffing challenges. A few positive strategies labs can implement to proactively address these pain points are as follows. Identify staffing trends Real-time data analytics can help identify staffing patterns and trends, such as peak periods of demand or seasonal fluctuations in lab workloads. By understanding these trends, labs can plan ahead ...
Gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted bacterial infection that affects more than 80 million people worldwide every year, has become resistant to almost all known antibiotics. That makes it notoriously difficult to treat, but left untreated, an infection could lead to serious or even fatal complications. It also increases a person’s risk of contracting HIV. A new study suggests artificial intelligence (AI) may help identify a vaccine’s key ingredients. This week in mBio, an international collaboration between academic and commercial researchers reported the identification of 2 promising antigens as candidates for a gonorrhea vaccine. The researchers used an AI model called Efficacy Discriminative Educated Network, or EDEN, to identify the protective proteins. They also used EDEN to generate scores that accurately predicted how well antigen combinations would reduce pathogenic bacterial populations of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the microbe that causes gonorrhea. “To the best of our knowledge, this correlation has not been shown before,” ...
Merck KGaA has signed a licensing agreement worth over €1.4bn with Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals for the rights to its next-generation PARP1 inhibitor HRS-1167 outside of China. The deal also includes an option for an exclusive licence for its Claudin-18.2 antibody drug conjugate (ADC), SHR-A1904. Compared to first-generation PARP inhibitors, HRS-1167 has higher selectivity and affinity for PARP1 and induces DNA trapping, Merck said, adding that the candidate is currently in phase 1 clinical development and “has the potential to be used as a monotherapy and as part of a combination therapy for treating a wider range of patients”. Danny Bar-Zohar, global head of research and development and chief medical officer for the Healthcare business of Merck KGaA, said: “This partnership with Hengrui fully aligns with both our external innovation ambition and our oncology research and development strategy by diversifying our robust internal pipeline in our focus areas of DNA damage ...
Novo Nordisk has agreed to acquire ocedurenone, a drug for uncontrolled hypertension, from KBP Biosciences in a deal worth up to $1.3bn. Ocedurenone, an orally administered, small molecule, non-steroidal mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist, is currently being evaluated in the late-stage CLARION-CKD trial as a treatment option for patients with uncontrolled hypertension as well as for those with advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD). Uncontrolled hypertension is when a person’s blood pressure remains high despite taking two or more blood pressure-lowering treatments. An estimated 1.28 billion adults aged 30 to 79 years worldwide have hypertension and only about 21% have it under control, marking a significant unmet need in the treatment of the condition. Martin Holst Lange, executive vice president and head of development at Novo, said: “Hypertension is a leading risk factor for cardiovascular events, heart failure, CKD and premature death. “With its expected benefit-risk profile, ocedurenone has best-in-class potential in treating ...
Voice pathology refers to a problem arising from abnormal conditions, such as dysphonia, paralysis, cysts, and even cancer, that cause abnormal vibrations in the vocal cords (or vocal folds). In this context, voice pathology detection (VPD) has received much attention as a non-invasive way to automatically detect voice problems. It consists of two processing modules: a feature extraction module to characterize normal voices and a voice detection module to detect abnormal ones. Machine learning methods like support vector machines (SVM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been successfully utilized as pathological voice detection modules to achieve good VPD performance. Also, a self-supervised, pretrained model can learn generic and rich speech feature representation, instead of explicit speech features, which further improves its VPD abilities. However, fine-tuning these models for VPD leads to an overfitting problem, due to a domain shift from conversation speech to the VPD task. As a result, the ...
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