After monitoring 167 AI drug research and development startups, we found six major industry trends

AI is becoming a new engine to promote drug research and development In the last article, we can see that almost all international pharmaceutical giants are involved Among their partners, in addition to large companies such as Ge / IBM, start-ups also account for a large proportion What are the characteristics of these start-ups and what are the current development trends of the industry? Recently, Simon Smith, Chief Strategic Officer of benchsci, has taken stock of 167 global AI drug R & D start-ups As a senior observer in the AI drug research and development industry, Simon Smith has consciously updated some new and cutting-edge companies in AI drug research and development since November 2017 At first, there were only 37 companies in his list, but now there are 167 After careful study, this list is very interesting Through the list, we find that according to the direction of AI application, these 167 companies are respectively located in 15 subdivisions, namely: Collecting and synthesizing information to understand the mechanism of disease and developing biomarkers Data generation and model reuse of existing drugs to generate new drug candidates Validation and optimization of candidate drug design preclinical trials Conduct preclinical trials design clinical trials recruit patients for clinical trials Optimizing clinical trial release data to analyze real world evidence Among them, 53, 29, 12, 11 and 10 are in the top five, including new candidate drugs generation, information collection and synthesis, drug design, understanding of disease mechanism, and drug validation and optimization, which are indeed relatively concentrated areas of start-ups In terms of generating new candidate drugs, AI can train a large number of molecular data to predict candidate drugs; analyze scientific research data sets, then form and limit hypotheses, and generate new insights; analyze data from healthy people and patients to find new biomarkers and treatment targets, etc., so as to shorten the time to market and improve the success of new drugs Energy In terms of time, these companies were mainly established in 2012-2018, with the largest number in 2014-2017, 18, 24, 27 and 28 respectively This period of time is exactly a period of the outbreak of artificial intelligence However, it is surprising that there were also eight between 1999 and 2005, the earliest of which was cotinga pharmaceuticals from the UK in 1999 The company mainly uses AI technology to predict biological activity from molecular structure Geographically, of the 167 start-ups, 92 are in the United States, followed by 24 in the United Kingdom, including Canada, Germany, Japan, Singapore, etc There are three AI drug R & D companies in China, namely Mozi, accutar and deep Zhiyao Through many years of observation and recording and relevant statistical data, Simon Smith summed up several major trends of current AI drug development in another article, which you can refer to One According to the data collected above, the formation of AI drug discovery start-ups has reached its peak, and the growth rate is slowing down Two Three Since 2016, the R & D investment and financing of drug a has increased every year Both 2017 and 2018 saw significant year-on-year growth But growth seems to be slowing as the market matures Four The amount of financing did not decrease, but was transferred to the later stage This is another sign that the market is maturing Five In drug R & D start-ups, there are a few countries / regions leading the situation, as shown in the following figure: Among these countries, the United States is a well deserved industry leader Moreover, these companies are concentrated in a few countries and regions Six In the field of AI drug research and development, the United States is a well deserved industry leader At the same time, there are some cities that have become more active in AI drug research and development They are usually active areas of emerging enterprises such as San Francisco, or they tend to have strength in machine learning and biological research, such as Toronto, Canada reference material: 1.6 Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery Trends and Statistics