Belgium-based UCB and Microsoft announced a new multi-year, strategic collaboration that combines Microsoft’s computational services, cloud, and artificial intelligence capabilities with UCB’s drug discovery and development technology.
The collaboration builds on the work UCB and Microsoft have already embarked on around COVID-19. As part of the COVID Moonshot project, UCB’s medicinal and computational chemists contributed compound designs to create an orally bioavailable anti-viral for COVID-19 – with the most potent series of compounds coming from UCB designs. The companies hope the combination of AI and UCB’s technology will accelerate the iteration cycles required to explore a vast chemical space to test many hypotheses and identify more effective molecules. The companies have four strategic objectives under the new collaboration – improving a patient’s overall journey; increasing the impact of treatments through a deeper understanding of the biological causes of the disease; providing better research data-driven insights to enable the faster discovery of therapeutic molecules; and accelerating clinical development timelines.
“We are delighted to be collaborating with Microsoft to uncover new insights to better understand a patient’s condition, as well as the science, and to enable an enhanced patient experience,” said Jean-Christophe Tellier, chief executive officer of UCB said in a statement. “By amplifying the power of scientific innovation through digital transformation, we hope to have a better understanding of what makes a patient’s journey unique so that we can provide personalized and differentiated medicine in a sustainable way.”
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Source: Biospace