Dustin Holloway is a computational biologist and expert in artificial intelligence (AI). Currently, he specializes in AI and technology ethics. Dustin has previously worked as an assistant professor of biomedical informatics and holds degrees from Harvard University, Boston University, and the Pennsylvania State University. He lives in the Greater Boston area. Any views he expresses here or in his writing are entirely his own, with no connection or reference to other entities, companies, institutions, or people.

My friends in pharma may like this - the world's first documentary video hackathon covering the discovery of a novel medicine from the development of AI platform to using this AI platform to discover a novel target, generate novel molecule and take it all the way into the human clinical trials. The target was discovered using aging research and it may be the first aging-clock derived therapeutic. We started recording the footage in 2020 and generated over 160 hours worth of footage material, interviews, laboratory experiments, internal presentations, successes, failures, daily life of deeply committed scientists - all on tape. We are now offering 2 years of footage to the documentary video experts to take part in the global competition to tell the story and explain how novel medicines are made. We have a panel of celebrity judges and great prizes for the winners.

Check out the on-demand sessions from the Low-Code/No-Code Summit to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers. In an era when biopharma research in drug R&D continues to be costly and slow, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based drug discovery platforms are rapidly growing, Paris-based pharmaceutical leader Sanofi announced its latest massive AI drug discovery deal, this time with startup Insilico Medicine, worth up to $1.2 billion. The research collaboration comes on the heels of several other high-value AI drug discovery partnership announcements from Sanofi, including with Atomwise in August; a partnership expansion with Exscientia last January; and an equity investment in Owkin a year ago. In June, Sanofi's global head of research platforms, Matt Truppo, said that the goal of these AI collaborations is to reduce drug development timelines by "a few years," which in turn brings down costs. According to an Insilico press release, pharmaceutical companies are moving in one of two directions: "Either they are cutting their AI software projects and firing departments, or, like Sanofi, they are doubling down on innovative technology – partnering with leading biotechs to develop new therapeutics using AI."

Drug discovery companies such as Insilico Medicine are using deepfake AI technology to design new molecules that can help treat diseases. Intel made a splash earlier this week when it unveiled its latest technology that can detect a deepfake in real-time with 96pc accuracy. AI such as this can help organisations around the world to prevent the spread of misinformation and protect themselves from cybercrime. But not all kinds of deepfakes are bad. The advancement of any emerging technology brings with it positive and negative uses – and the future of healthcare certainly has much to gain from deepfakes.

Volatility clustering is a crucial property that has a substantial impact on stock market patterns. Nonetheless, developing robust models for accurately predicting future stock price volatility is a difficult research topic. For predicting the volatility of three equities listed on India's national stock market (NSE), we propose multiple volatility models depending on the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH), Glosten-Jagannathan-GARCH (GJR-GARCH), Exponential general autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (EGARCH), and LSTM framework. Sector-wise stocks have been chosen in our study. The sectors which have been considered are banking, information technology (IT), and pharma. yahoo finance has been used to obtain stock price data from Jan 2017 to Dec 2021. Among the pulled-out records, the data from Jan 2017 to Dec 2020 have been taken for training, and data from 2021 have been chosen for testing our models. The performance of predicting the volatility of stocks of three sectors has been evaluated by implementing three different types of GARCH models as well as by the LSTM model are compared. It has been observed the LSTM performed better in predicting volatility in pharma over banking and IT sectors. In tandem, it was also observed that E-GARCH performed better in the case of the banking sector and for IT and pharma, GJR-GARCH performed better.

Today Insilico Medicine announced the completion of a second closing of its Series D round, led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified growth fund of Saudi Aramco Ventures, bringing the total Series D financing to $95 million. Other global investors with expertise in the biopharmaceutical and life sciences sectors also participated. The financing brought in Prosperity7 as a new investor, alongside current investors in the Series D round, including a large, diversified asset management firm on the US West Coast, B Capital Group, Warburg Pincus, BHR Partners, Qiming Venture Partners, Deerfield, Pavilion Capital, BOLD Capital Partners, and WS Investment Company. Insilico's founder and CEO, Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, also invested in the Series D round. Insilico Medicine plans to grow its presence in Saudi Arabia, building on the recent investment from Prosperity7.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in drug discovery is now on a steep rise. A growing number of companies compete to develop new drugs faster, cheaper, and with a much higher success rate by using AI tools at all crucial stages of the drug discovery pipeline. Most of the players in this quickly expanding market are oriented towards big pharma, which is routinely investing billions into drug development. Such a partnership is tempting not only for startup companies but also for established leaders in the field of AI-based drug development because it provides stable multi-year contracts backed up by the financial resources and infrastructure of the pharmaceutical giants. As a result, end-to-end AI-based drug discovery services are tailored for large corporate customers.

It's no secret the medtech industry has embraced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Pharmaceutical companies are leaping into the AI/ML space, too. There have been about 100 partnerships that have been established between pharmaceutical companies and AI vendors, according to a report from clinicaltrialsarena.com citing GlobalData Healthcare data. Earlier today (Wednesday), Merck announced its plan to dive deeper into the space. The pharma powerhouse said it was launching the Merck Digital Sciences Studio (MDSS), which will help early-stage biomedical startups with direct investment, access to powerful Azure Cloud computing, and opportunities to pilot their technologies in collaboration with discovery and clinical scientists at Merck.

When you ask who is "doing" AI the best, the answer is rarely a Fortune 500 Pharma company, and there are a few reasons for this. Most people think of genomics for healthcare AI applications. Another common one is drug discovery, which is very linear. According to Dr. Adam Jenkins, the linear nature of these applications can hide some of the most interesting ways that pharmaceuticals are using AI after commercialization. Post-launch, the opportunities aren't nearly as direct, but that means there could be some interesting applications.

Insilico Medicine and Fosun Pharma have announced an important strategic collaboration agreement. The partnership was announced yesterday at the 40th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The companies will use Insilico's AI driven drug discovery platform to advance the discovery and development of drugs targeting a number of different diseases. The collaboration includes an upfront payment of $13 million plus an equity investment in Insilico Medicine of an undisclosed amount. The collaboration will combine Insilico's end-to-end AI-driven drug discovery platforms and Fosun Pharma's clinical development and commercial expertise to discover and develop a portfolio of novel therapeutics.