dr Thomas Fuchs, Dean of Artificial Intelligence at Mount Sinai and Founder of Paige, discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on healthcare and its use in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
Developing life-saving drugs takes a lot of time, money and testing. But one company’s artificial intelligence-based technology offers a way to reduce all three while saving the lives of more people and animals.
VeriSIM Life has developed “digital twins” of different human body types and different animals, and uses machine intelligence to test how drugs would affect real subjects before even moving to clinical trials.
VeriSIM Life uses artificial intelligence to test medicines using digital replicas of human and animal biology. (iStock / iStock)
And at lightning speed.
Founded in 2017 by Dr. Jo Varshney, a veterinarian with a Ph.D. In the fields of genomics and cancer biology, VeriSIM works with pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies and academic institutions to assess the success and safety of drugs using AI instead of animals during testing.
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The drug is then assigned a translational index score, which Varshney compares to a credit score. If the score is low, drug companies may need to either change direction in their experimental design or return to the drawing board.
But by using AI simulations instead of experimental animal testing, a new, working compound can quickly get started because the software platform is capable of testing millions of hypotheses, rather than the typical trail-and-error process that usually takes years.
VeriSIM’s platform replaces the need for research and development costs associated with animal testing, which could collectively save US companies approximately $20 billion per year and save countless animals from animal testing.
VeriSIM Life uses machine learning to test drugs, replacing animal testing. (VeriSIM Life)
Varshney told FOX Business that she believes VeriSIM’s technology is one of the most unique applications of AI in the field because it not only reduces cost and time, but ultimately reduces risk for drug developers, as typically about 89% of drug candidates that pass animal tests, tests on humans fail.
The technology is also used in drug development, enabling drug testing for smaller populations of patients that pharmaceutical companies might not have been able to justify financially with traditional research and development costs.
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In addition to VeriSIM, Varshney runs a subsidiary called PulmoSIM Therapeutics, which uses the platform to develop drugs for a population of rare diseases. VeriSIM is currently working with the Mayo Clinic to advance drug discovery and development.
dr Jo Varshney, Founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life (VeriSIM Life)
VeriSIM’s primary customers are companies developing human medicines, but the company also has customers using the technology for veterinary drug development. To date, the tech company has raised around $25 million from investors.
“From a financial standpoint, this is a tremendous outcome for the companies, but it’s also a tremendous outcome for the patients who are really waiting for the drug to go to market or participate in these research studies,” Varshney told FOX Business.
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“My vision is that with this technology we will have more medicines at a lower cost worldwide,” she explained. “So no one is leaving money on the table because drug companies are making more revenue by putting more drugs on the market.” [and] Patients get cheaper medicines because we can now distribute more medicines.”