Singapore's EDDC to discover new AI-driven COVID-19 therapies

Auransa, Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven pharmaceutical company, on 29 Sep 2020 announced a research collaboration around drug discovery to fight COVID-19 and coronaviruses in general, with the Experimental Drug Development Centre (EDDC), Singapore's national platform for drug discovery and development. The partnership brings together two organizations with complementary expertise and a shared goal of improved pandemic response. Auransa's proprietary predictive computational platform, SMarTR Engine, leverages machine learning, advanced analytics, and mathematics in an AI framework to generate insights from molecular data on the disease biology and patient subtypes. EDDC possesses a full range of drug discovery capabilities, including assay development, high throughput screening, antibody cloning, medicinal chemistry, and ADME/toxicology. These capabilities allow EDDC to identify drug hits and leads, and develop them to the preclinical candidate stage in-house.