Olivier TOURY

🎉Exciting news! 🎊 Apeiron to Expand Investment in Synthetic Lethality Pipeline After New Phase in Collaboration with Exscientia! 🎊 July 18, 2024 – San Francisco, USA, and Shanghai, China 🌍Apeiron Therapeutics (Apeiron) announced that it has reached an agreement with Exscientia plc (NASDAQ: EXAI), granting Exscientia full control over GTAEXS617 ('617) and all related intellectual property. This asset is currently in the ELUCIDATE Phase 1/2 clinical trial stage. Under the terms of the agreement, Apeiron will receive an upfront payment of $30 million in cash and equity, in addition to receiving single digit royalties if Exscientia or a third party commercializes '617, which could be worth over $100 million in the upcoming years. The ELUCIDATE trial's monotherapy dose escalation phase aims to evaluate the safety, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics of '617 in patients with advanced solid tumors. Recruitment for the trial is progressing well. Data from the monotherapy dose escalation phase is expected in the second half of 2024 and transition to a combination dose escalation phase in late 2024 or early 2025. Dr. Mingxi Li, CEO of Apeiron, commented, "Our collaboration with Exscientia has entered a new phase, with Exscientia taking full control of '617 while we remain a supportive shareholder. We are confident in the potential of '617 and believe Exscientia has the resources and capabilities to develop this transformative asset. This transaction enables us to concentrate our efforts on the remainder of our synthetic lethality pipeline and deepen our commitment to providing innovative therapies to cancer patients worldwide. This includes GTA182, a potentially best-in-class next-generation PRMT5 inhibitor, which will soon enter clinical trials.” 🎉 🌎 #expand #investment #successful #biotech #innovation #syntheticlethality #cancerresearch https://lnkd.in/gABsxiHW

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Last year at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), we launched Valence Labs – a machine learning research lab in Montreal focused on developing the next generation of cutting-edge methods and models for drug discovery, with a focus on open science and academic partnerships. This year, we're showcasing discoveries that have emerged from these collaborations and helping to launch Polaris - Benchmarks for methods that matter – a new platform for ML in drug discovery that aims to provide standardized, domain-appropriate datasets, guidelines, and tools for method evaluation and comparison. 🎉 Polaris Launch Party is 7/25, register here: https://lu.ma/wj1agv8o Discoveries include: ◼ Learning to Scale Logits for Temperature-Conditional GFlowNets: In this paper, researchers including Yoshua Bengio demonstrate Logit-scaling GFlowNets (Logit-GFN) – a new generic architecture design of temperature-controlled Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) which offer a training framework for learning generative policies that sequentially construct compositional objects to be sampled according to a reward function and also adjust based on temperature, a limitation of current models. GFlowNets can uncover a multitude of highly related samples from a diverse set of modes, making them ideal for drug discovery. They also introduced an online discovery algorithm that uses Logit-GFN alongside a temperature control policy, inducing superior exploration-exploitation trade-offs. In experiments, they found that the Logit-GFN architecture significantly enhances training stability, characterized by a smooth and rapid loss convergence. 📎 https://lnkd.in/ekDVhV47 ◼ Graph Positional and Structural Encoder: In this paper, researchers present the Graph Positional and Structural Encoder (GPSE), the first-ever graph encoder designed to replace hand-crafted positional and structural encodings (PSE) by learned PSE in any graph neural network (GNN). Hand-crafting PSEs that work optimally for all graph prediction tasks has been challenging and prone to overfitting. By learning an efficient common latent representation from multiple PSEs, the proposed GPSE learns an efficient common latent that is highly transferable: The encoder trained on a particular graph dataset can be used on datasets drawn from markedly different distributions and modalities. Across a wide range of benchmarks, GPSE-enhanced models significantly outperformed those that employ hand-crafted PSEs, paving the way for the development of foundational pre-trained graph encoders for extracting positional and structural information, and highlighting their potential as a powerful, efficient alternative to explicitly computed PSEs. 📎 https://lnkd.in/efhBCiXH #icml #openscience #academic #ai #ml #drugdiscovery #techbio #gnn Berton Earnshaw Joohwan Ko Emmanuel Bengio Woo Chang Kim Semih Cantürk Renming Liu Vincent Létourneau Guy Wolf Dominique Beaini Ladislav Rampasek

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Roles of the Chlorine and Methoxy Groups in Drug Discovery | https://lnkd.in/gpvXdSC9 Thu, Sep 26, 2024 8 AM PDT / 11 AM EDT / 5 PM CEST Small functional groups can greatly influence the interactions of a small-molecule ligand with the binding pocket of a protein or nucleic acid. Possible steps that a medicinal chemist could take to optimize a phenyl-containing hit molecule are summarized in the Topliss tree. The most important substituents that one encounters in this flowchart are chloro, methyl, and methoxy. Although the role of the methyl group has been highlighted in the literature and referred to as "magic methyl" to describe unexpectedly significant potency improvements, the roles of the chloro and methoxy groups in drugs has not been thoroughly explored. In this Flash Talk, Yoshihiro Ishihara will discuss the beneficial effects of chloro and methoxy substituents on intermolecular interactions, as well as the unique advantages and disadvantages of employing these substituents in drug discovery. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about the groups often used in medicinal chemistry programs and engage with Yoshi in a Q&A session. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gpvXdSC9

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We thank the BIO International Convention for inviting Persperion Diagnostics Inc.'s Founder and COO, Xinyu(Alan) Liu, to speak on a medtech panel in San Diego, CA. The panel topic, “Competing as a Diagnostic Company in the Current Funding Environment: New Funding Models,” was timely and relevant to many diagnostic and personalized medicine companies, the current market and funding landscape, and other start-ups in the medtech sector. For more information: https://lnkd.in/drZpGUQ7 #biotech #medtech #healthtech #healthcarediagnostics #personalizedmedicine #startup

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🧬 Weekly Investment News in Biotech & Health 🎯 💡 CardiaTec Biosciences secures $6.5M in seed funding led by Montage Ventures, with Continuum Health Ventures and others, to accelerate computational drug discovery for cardiovascular disease. 🚀 Phagenesis Ltd raises $42M in Series D financing led by EQT Life Sciences and Sectoral Asset Management, to expand its dysphagia therapy Phagenyx in the US and Europe. 💰 Bain Capital Life Sciences closes a $3B fourth funding round to back transformative life sciences companies globally, focusing on therapeutics, medical devices, and diagnostics. 🔬 Discure Technologies secures $16M in Series A funding led by BOLD Capital Partners to advance treatments for degenerative disc disease. 💸 NanoSyrinx raises £10M in a financing round co-led by BGF, Octopus Ventures, and M Ventures to develop its nano-syringe platform for targeted biologic delivery. 🏥 Spatium Medical secures €5M from InnovationQuarter, Demcon Investment Fund, and others to advance its smart insufflation technology for laparoscopic surgeries. 📈 SpectraWAVE, Inc. raises $50M in Series B funding led by Johnson & Johnson to support commercial expansion of its coronary artery imaging system HyperVue. 💉 Candid Therapeutics launches with $370M in funding co-led by Venrock, Fairmount Partners, TCGX, venBio, Fidelity Investments, and OrbiMed to develop bispecific antibodies for autoimmune diseases. 🌱 Form3 raises $60M in a Series C extension round led by British Patient Capital to enhance its cloud-native payments platform for financial institutions. 🏆 cureator awards $1.865M in top-up funding to early-stage biotech companies in Australia, furthering innovations in antimicrobial testing and CNS treatments. 💰 Oncimmune secures $2.2M in new contracts to enhance its autoantibody profiling services, forecasting profitability by FY25. 🚀 ArcanaBio secures funding from Denmark's BioInnovation Institute to advance label-free liquid biopsy solutions, integrating AI and nano-photonics technology. 💡 Cognitive Credit raises $10M in Series B funding led by ETFS Capital to expand AI-driven debt analytics solutions for institutional investors. 📈 Segmed, Inc. raises $10.4M in Series A funding led by iGan Partners and Advocate Health to expand its imaging data platform for healthcare and life sciences. 🚀 AEW secures $150M refinancing for its life science building in Bedford, Mass., backed by Apollo Global Management, Inc., to support further lab space development. 🏥 CeresAI secures Series D funding led by REMUS Capital to expand its AI-powered platform helping growers and insurers improve crop yields. #Startups #Biotech #Medtech #LifeSciences #Investments #VentureCapital

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