AbSci a leading synthetic biology company enabling drug discovery and biomanufacturing of next-generation biotherapeutics, today announced the acquisition of Denovium, Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning company. AbSci will integrate the Denovium Engine into its drug discovery and manufacturing cell line development capabilities and expects to realize near term synergies using AI deep learning to better predict relevant variants and cell line characteristics for each new project. With continued application and further training of the Denovium Engine, AbSci’s vision is to make in silico biologic drug discovery and cell line development a reality. This will enable next-generation therapies to make it to market at unprecedented speeds. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.
“This acquisition represents the perfect synergy of groundbreaking synthetic biology and cutting-edge deep learning AI to create in silico predictive protein drug design and cell line development capabilities with the potential to completely change the paradigm of biopharmaceutical discovery and development,” said Sean McClain, founder and CEO of AbSci. “Incorporating deep learning will allow us to explore all possible protein sequences in silico, including those that Nature’s evolutionary trajectory has yet to consider, to identify drug candidates with optimal therapeutic properties and manufacturability. Combining that design power with our proprietary data from our Protein Printing platform, AbSci can create a new gold standard for drug discovery and cell line development for next-generation biologics while at the same time allowing for creation of novel biologies previously unattainable.”
The Denovium Engine is a multidimensional deep learning model built to interpret, categorize, predict, and evolve function and behavior of proteins. The platform incorporates far more than sequence and structure relationships, having been trained on functional data from more than 100 million proteins and across over 700,000 descriptive parameters. AbSci intends to further train the Denovium Engine on its proprietary internally-generated multidimensional protein characterization datasets that include elements of protein functionality, expression, and manufacturability.
“Training the Denovium Engine on the volumes of high-quality protein function and manufacturability data being generated by AbSci’s Protein Printing platform allows our platform to reach its full potential of de novo design of manufacturable proteins having desirable functionalities,” said Toby Richardson, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Denovium. “We expect that the platform will be able to design proteins by predicting not only the optimal sequence for each therapeutic candidate, but also the conditions for manufacturing, to enable production of therapeutic proteins that were previously not possible.”
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Source: Biospace