Absci Corp. (Nasdaq: ABSI) unveiled a new technology that CEO Sean McClain said Tuesday can drastically reduce the time it takes to get a novel drug into the clinic.
The Vancouver-based company used “zero-shot generative AI” to create new antibodies on the computer.
McClain likened the breakthrough to ChatGPT or DALL-E, which use generative AI to go from text to image.
“It’s the same type of principle or idea applied to drug discovery, in our case, going from (disease) target to drug all at the click of a button,” McClain said. “What this is enabling is going from a paradigm of drug discovery where you’re searching for a needle in a haystack to where we’re creating the needle, the drug candidate, and doing this in zero shot.”
In other words, the model hasn’t seen the target or anything similar, and yet it can generate a drug candidate from scratch that can bind to the target.
Absci is already using this method, which it is in the process of patenting, in several drug discovery programs with pharmaceutical partners. A preprint manuscript out Tuesday showed it to work over four different targets that have a wide range of indications and diseases, McClain said.
The approach stands in stark contrast to the traditional way biological drug discovery is done, often by immunizing a mouse and going through a “long iterative process and ultimately getting suboptimal hits,” McClain said. “You can’t tell a mouse to generate an antibody that has the functionality you want or hit the part of the target you want, so with this breakthrough, you eliminate the biological ways of discovering drugs and design the drug the way you want it the first time.”
The discovery has the potential to cut the time it takes to get a drug candidate into the clinic from five and a half years down to just 18-24 months, while increasing the probability of success, McClain said.
The new discovery has not been peer reviewed but was validated in the wet lab. Absci says its proprietary high-throughput wet lab technology can test and validate almost 3 million unique AI-generated designs per week, above industry standards.
“This could really in the future disrupt the process for biologics discovery,” said Andreas Busch, Absci’s chief innovation officer. “Now you will be much much faster. It will deliver better compounds because you can optimize the antibody.”
McClain said he anticipates the first drug designed with “zero shot generative AI” to be in the clinic in 2024.
