An Israeli biotechnology innovation lab set up last year and backed by some of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Merck has formed a new startup that will harness artificial intelligence (AI) to assess drug efficacy in pre-clinical trials and improve chances for success in later stages. The startup, OMEC.AI, is the first company established with funding and support from AION Labs, a Rehovot-based organization launched last October with a mission to create and invest in early-stage startups focused on AI and computational biology in drug discovery and development. AION Labs is a collaboration between pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, and Teva Pharmaceuticals, together with Amazon's AWS and the Israel Biotech Fund, and is headed by Mati Gill, a former senior executive at Teva, and Dr. Yair Benita, the former head of computational biology at Compugen, science operations at CytoReason, and principal scientist at MSD (Merck). AION Labs ran three bootcamps over the past year to field scientist founders and inventors focused on addressing key industry challenges identified by the global pharma companies such as designing antibodies for targeted therapeutics and analyzing data using AI to assess and predict the clinical readiness of drug candidates. The latter challenge produced OMEC.AI, founded this summer with $2 million (NIS 7 million) in seed funding by AI experts Ori Shachar and Amir Harel, both of whom previously led AI teams at Mobileye, Intel's Jerusalem-based autonomous driving subsidiary.

Mati Gill's exposure to the power of pharma collaboration can't be overstated. During his 11 years as COO of the Global Legal Group, and later, head of government affairs, corporate & international markets at Teva Pharmaceuticals, he was exposed to virtually every aspect of the business. When Teva made a concerted effort to build its corporate innovation strategy to strengthen its development platforms and pipeline, he was an undisputed pick to lead the exercise in support of Teva R&D for the Israeli pharma titan. As he helped make inroads with Israeli's academic and emerging life sciences ecosystems, a promising opportunity began to reveal itself and became the focus of his work: The roles of computational biology and artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery and development. Gill found the concept nascent among the next generation of innovators but hampered by the pharmaceutical industry at large.

Robert Langer, the co-founder of Moderna and a lauded MIT professor, said, "We are at the tipping point of the modernization of drug discovery" and that the "Quris platform could be a significant value to pharma companies and the health of society at large." Langer is a member of the scientific advisory board of Quris, which officially launched this week and announced $9 million in seed funding to support its efforts. Nobel laureate Aaron Ciechanover is the chairman of the company's scientific advisory board. Quris, based in Israel and Boston, is an artificial intelligence (AI) company operating in the pharmaceutical space. Its team has developed an AI platform to predict which drug candidates will work most safely and effectively in humans.

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