Project description
Intelligent discovery platform for better drug development
New drug development and clinical trials takes about 15 years and costs on average EUR 2.3 billion with a success rate of around 12 %. EU funding has enabled InterAx Biotech to develop a systems biology and artificial intelligence-based platform for drug candidate selection with built-in in vivo predictability to dramatically reduce animal testing (60-80 %) and increase probability of success in clinical trials. Their custom-designed services focus on G-protein coupled receptors, which are targets of 40 % of existing drugs. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies can outsource critical stages in drug discovery at reduced expenses and shorter time to market (10 years) – a win-win for the companies as well as the consumers.
Objective
InterAx Biotech, a Swiss company and spin-off from the ETH Zürich and the Paul Scherrer Institute, has built PICARD, an innovative and unique lead discovery platform for the design and selection of better drug candidates. PICARD combines a systems biology approach with experimental data and uses artificial intelligence methods to design novel compounds with the desired properties. This holistic approach differentiates PICARD from technologies now used in the pharmaceutical industry. Our systems biology approach provides PICARD with in vivo predictability, dramatically reducing the need for animal testing (60-80%) and increasing the probability of success of drug candidates in clinical trials. At the moment, the success rate in clinical trials is lower than 12%. This produces sizeable costs (€2.3 billion) and extremely long time to market (15 years or longer) in drug development.
We offer custom-designed PICARD services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies that are outsourcing key stages of their drug discovery process. PICARD remarkably increases the efficiency of the drug discovery process, offering our customers economic savings of at least €150.7 million per developed drug and a reduction of time to market to 10 years.
PICARD focuses on G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs), which are the target of 40% of the developed drugs. However, >70% of the pharmacologically relevant GPCRs are yet to be exploited, which creates an untapped global market opportunity of €71.2 billion. We intend to acquire, in seven years, 1-2% of the European and US available markets (€940 million). To achieve this goal, we have designed a business model in which PICARD is offered at increasing levels of support, investment and risks for our customers: service projects, pilot projects and long term partnerships. This strategy is devised to lower market entry barriers, allowing us to start commercialization right after Phase 2 execution, with a zero time to market.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
5234 Villingen
Switzerland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.