A drug developed entirely by artificial intelligence (AI) from scratch has entered Phase 1 clinical testing for the first time.
Phase 1 trials are when a new drug is tested on humans with the dosage levels required for medicinal effects.
This part of clinical testing is concerned with safety rather than the drug’s effectiveness.
If it passes Phase 1 testing, the drug’s clinical effectiveness will then be tested in Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials, first with a few hundred people and then a sample size of thousands.
The drug is designed to treat a condition known as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), which is a scarring lung disease.
It is not known what causes IPF, but it affects five million people each year worldwide, with an estimated 30,000 people living with the disease in the UK.
It mainly affects older people and is a progressive and eventually terminal disease.
It is hoped that the new drug, developed by Insilico Medicine, will have a therapeutic effect on sufferers of the disease and, intriguingly, it is also believed to have anti-ageing properties.
It has already passed Phase 0 trials, where the drug is administered in human volunteers in lower doses than are required for therapeutic benefits.
Phase 1 trial will involve 80 volunteers
The Phase 1 trial will involve an initial cohort of 80 volunteers, half of whom will be given increasing doses of the drug.
Insilico Medicine describes itself as an end-to-end, AI-driven pharma-technology company with a mission to accelerate the development and discovery of new drugs using its proprietary AI platform.
This involves discovering novel targets, generating novel molecules, and modelling clinical trials before they actually happen.
This isn’t the first drug that has been discovered with the help of AI.
UK company Exscientia made headlines last year for the first AI-designed drug to enter Phase 1 testing, though it was for an established protein target.
Utah’s Recursion Pharmaceuticals also repurposes existing drugs using AI, but the Insilico drug is the first to have been developed entirely by AI from end to end.
The achievement is important not just for sufferers of pulmonary fibrosis but also for the field of AI-based drug research.
Before the advent of these techniques, researchers noted that the cost of pharmaceutical research and development was doubling every decade.
This was coined ‘Eroom’s Law’ as it was essentially the reverse of Moore’s Law on improvements in computing power.
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