Insilico Brings Generative AI to Drug Development and Discovery

<p>It may feel like generative AI technology suddenly burst onto the scene over the last year or two, with the appearance of text-to-image models like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, or chatbots like ChatGPT that can churn out astonishingly convincing text thanks to the power of large language models. But in fact, the real work on generative AI has been happening in the background, in small increments, for many years. One demonstration of that comes from Insilico Medicine, where Harry's guest this week, Alex Zhavoronkov, is the co-CEO. </p><p>Since at least 2016, Zhavoronkov has been publishing papers about the power of a class of AI algorithms called generative adversarial networks or GANs to help with drug discovery. One of the main selling points for GANs in pharma research is that they can generate lots of possible designs for molecules that could carry out specified functions in the body, such as binding to a defective protein to stop it from working. Drug hunters still have to sort through all the possible molecules identified by GANs to see which ones will actually work <i>in vitro</i> or <i>in vivo, </i>but at least their pool of starting points can be bigger and possibly more specific.</p><p>Zhavoronkov says that when Insilico first started touting this approach back in the mid-2010s, few people in the drug business believed it would work. So to persuade investors and partners of the technology's power, the company decided to take a drug designed by its own algorithms all the way to clinical trials. And it’s now done that. This February the FDA granted orphan drug designation to a small-molecule drug Insilico is testing as a treatment for a form of lung scarring called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Both the target for the compound, and the design of the molecule itself, were generated by Insilico’s AI. </p><p>The designation was a big milestone for the company and for the overall idea of using generative models in drug discovery. In this week's interview, Zhavoronkov talks about how Insilico got to this po