During PICARD, InterAx has proven and extended its technology, and shaped its business environment to enable the next phase of the company growth to achieve its vision.
All milestones and deliverables were met or overreached. InterAx expanded its systems biology platform (PIC-Sys) and experimental assays (PIC-Say) to several additional GPCR targets – showing the technology is applicable to different GPCRs and drug modalities. In parallel, a unique AI platform (PIC-VisAI) driven by systems biology was developed and applied on real drug discovery programs. InterAx discovery platform now only allows to find good binders and characterize their effect on cells, but also to predict in silico which drug candidates will have desired signaling properties and efficacy. InterAx launched own in-house drug discovery in the field of oncology and conducted several revenue-generating commercial projects, including Lundbeck, Boehringer Ingelheim, and GPCR Therapeutics. An array of relations with potential customers, partners and investors was established to launch the next phase of growth of the company. The potential impact of our platform on drug discovery was confirmed by very positive feedbacks from key opinion leaders at scientific conferences and from major GPCR industry players, as well as from venture capital firms.
Main achievements during the second reporting period:
Milestone 3 (WP2): the capacity of PIC-VisAI algorithm to predict GCPR signaling parameters was verified – with not just one, but five signaling parameters of beta-2-adrenergic receptor shown amenable for prediction. The PIC-VisAI was tested close to real-world scenario – predicting properties of a test set of novel chemical entities, before their synthesis and characterization. The algorithm showed an average 69% and maximum 85% prediction accuracy, thus opening a way to generate in vivo-mimicking systems biology information at the early stages of drug development.
Milestone 4 (WP4): the customer portfolio pipeline was grown with more than 60 presentations at 7 partnering conferences, 25+ dedicated follow-up presentations to scientific teams in respective companies, 10+ initiated negotiations for pilot projects, 3 pilot project launches and 5 more currently in negotiation phase. Moreover, InterAx continuously engaged with stakeholders and key opinion leaders in pharmaceutical industry and academia. This disseminates the knowledge about InterAx vision and technology, maintains existing connections, and builds new ones with potential customers and business partners.
Milestone 5 (WP3): three external customer projects were successfully launched, and additional fourth internal drug-discovery project at InterAx. All projects demonstrated strong value of PIC-Say / PIC-Sys / PIC-VisAI technology to measure and explain drug pharmacological action at the cellular level. Several important technology advancements were made along the way, in particular the formulation and use of “signaling fingerprint” data representation, which summarizes the outputs of InterAx mathematical models into a human- and machine-readable form.
