On September 7, AI drug developer Insilico Medicine announced a strategic cooperation agreement with Mox Bio. Mox Bio’s scaled multi-omics data will be systematically fed into Insilico’s Pharma.AI data warehouse to support training, validation and model iteration for its PandaOmics platform and its newly launched multi-agent virtual aging cell platform (VAC), according to Jiemian News.
Insilico said the collaboration is intended to help accelerate early-stage drug discovery by using AI to explore disease mechanisms, target discovery and validation, and candidate molecule design more efficiently. The company also said its virtual cell approach is meant to move some experiments from the lab into a computational environment first, so researchers can generate hypotheses and narrow down which results are worth testing in wet-lab, animal and clinical studies. Insilico added that it has already simulated its idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis TNIK inhibitor rentosertib to examine its effects on human cell signaling pathways.
The company said the virtual aging cell model adds biological age as a variable, allowing researchers to compare how the same intervention may behave in younger and older cellular states. Insilico said this is especially relevant because many age-related diseases occur in older populations, while preclinical animal studies are often conducted in younger animals. It also said some virtual cell models developed over the past two years have not significantly outperformed simpler statistical baseline models in independent benchmarks, and that performance remains limited for cell types underrepresented in training data.