Cyclica CEO Naheed Kurji Says AI Could Create a New Paradigm for Drug Development - Top Chinese CRO, Biopharma News, Drug Development News WXPRESS

Toronto-based Cyclica President and CEO Naheed Kurji acknowledges that artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology, but he contends it is not the "silver bullet" for drug discovery and development. Instead, he says that AI together with cloud-based computing could serve as a catalyst for a new approach to drug development. Kurji emphasizes that it is important to create "a virtual drug discovery ecosystem where a number of companies who are expert in their space come together and present a more holistic solution than any individual one could do itself because there is no one silver bullet to this problem. The market is so big and there are so many issues, one company can't do it alone." Kurji leads a five-year-old company that has developed and validated a cloud-based platform, called Ligand Express, which uses biophysics, bioinformatics and AI to help pharmaceutical companies navigate the drug discovery pipeline by assessing the safety and efficacy of drugs. The integrated platform enables companies to screen potential small-molecule drugs against repositories of structurally-characterized proteins or'proteomes' to identify significant protein targets. The platform then leverages AI to determine the biological relevance of these targets, and systems biology data to link this information to particular biological pathways or diseases. Kurji says Cyclica's platform, broadly launched in November 2017 already is being used by some of the top 50 pharma companies globally.