Using AI to speed drug discovery

The biomedical startup was founded by University of Toronto alumni David Q. Chen, Elvis Wianda, Liran Belenzon, Tom Leung.So far the venture has raised US$8 million, contributed by a group of investors including Montreal's iNovia Capital and Google's Gradient Ventures (which is Alphabet's AI venture capital firm). The new company is called BenchSci and it aims to use artificial intelligence to scan through millions of data points, drawn from published research papers, in order to find new compounds that can help to accelerate the drug discovery process. The focus of the new venture is with finding commercial antibodies. The researchers spent two years building machine learning software that can extract antibody usage data from published figures. This involves decoding millions of papers, with the end result of making the data easily discoverable for scientists.