Takeda Uses AI To Identify Promising Molecules

Efficiently and effectively identifying high-quality drug candidates for clinical development is challenging, even for large companies like Takeda that has extensive R&D expertise and therapeutic experience in the areas of oncology, gastroenterology, and diseases of the central nervous system. To combat this challenge, Takeda, not unlike others in the industry, is looking to augment its internal drug discovery abilities with innovative capabilities from outside the company – at pharma and bio companies, as well as academic institutions around the world. The search for partners with unique drug discovery capabilities prompted Takeda to enter into an alliance with Numerate. Numerate is a software company that has developed algorithms that analyze large amounts of data and find promising unexplored chemical space for the human drug targets Takeda wants to pursue. "They [Numerate] are able to leverage publicly available data as well as our proprietary data to computationally envision new chemical space for novel therapies," says David Weitz, Head of Takeda California and Global Research Externalization for Takeda California.