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 167 companies are distributed in 15 subdivisions According to the application direction of AI, these 167 companies are respectively located in 15 subdivisions They are: collecting and synthesizing information to understand the mechanism of disease, developing biomarker generation data and models, reusing existing drugs to generate new candidate drugs, verifying and optimizing candidate drug design drugs Design preclinical trials, design preclinical trials, design clinical trials, recruit patients for clinical trials, optimize clinical trials, release data, analyze evidence in the real world 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 The establishment time is concentrated in 2012-2018, of which 2014-2017 is the most from the perspective of time The establishment time of these companies is mainly concentrated in 2012-2018, of which 2014-2017 is the most, respectively 18, 24, 27 and 28 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 The United States has 92 start-ups at most, followed by the United Kingdom 24 in terms of region Of the 167 start-ups, the United States has 92 at most, followed by the United Kingdom 24, among which Canada, Germany, Japan, Singapore and so on are also included 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 1 The establishment speed is slowing down According to the data collected above, it can be found that the formation of AI drug discovery start-ups has reached its peak, and the growth speed is slowing down 2 Most start-ups focus on discovering new or reused molecular entities as shown in the figure According to statistics, most start-ups focus on discovering new and reused molecular entities This includes generating new drug candidates, reusing existing drugs, designing drugs, and validating and optimizing drug candidates In fact, this accounts for about half of AI drug R & D companies, but it also means that there is much more competition in this field than in other fields 3 Investment and financing continue to increase, but the pace is slowing down Since 2016, the investment and financing of a drug R & D has increased every year Both 2017 and 2018 saw significant year-on-year growth But growth seems to be slowing as the market matures 4 The amount of financing in the later stage of venture capital transfer has not decreased, but has been transferred to the later stage This is another sign that the market is maturing 5 Most of the start-ups in the United States are in drug R & D start-ups, showing a situation dominated by a few countries / regions, as shown in the following figure: in these countries, the United States is a well deserved industry leader Moreover, these companies are concentrated in a few countries and regions 6 San Francisco and Toronto are the most active cities in the world In the field of AI drug research and development, the United States is worthy of the industry leader At the same time, there are also some cities that have become more active in AI drug research and development They are usually in the field of emerging enterprises such as San Francisco, or they tend to have strength in machine learning and biological research, such as Toronto, Canada Reference: 1.6 artificial intelligence in drug discovery trends and statistics 2 167 startups using artificial intelligence in drug discovery