Takeda's psoriasis pill developed with AI assistance succeeds in trials Psoriasis is a chronic autoimmune disorder that causes rashes marked by itchy, scaly rashes and afflicts more than 125 million people worldwide. Takeda Pharmaceutical announced that its oral psoriasis drug zasocitinib proved safe and effective in late-stage trials, marking a milestone in its effort to treat the incurable skin condition and offset looming revenue pressure. Patients with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis who took the once-daily pill showed significantly clearer skin compared with those on placebo or the existing therapy apremilast, the company said in a statement Thursday. Takeda plans to submit data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other regulators beginning in fiscal year 2026. If approved, zasocitinib would join the small but growing oral psoriasis treatments -- long a market dominated by ointments and injectable antibody therapies -- and stand out as one of the first drugs discovered with the help of artificial intelligence.

Last month, the pharma company Takeda began recruiting patients for a clinical trial of a promising Covid-19 treatment involving antibodies drawn from the blood of recovered patients. It normally takes several weeks to collect people's information, determine who may be suitable for the trial, and get the paperwork in order. With the coronavirus still spreading, Takeda sped things up using a quick and simple trick: using software to record tasks like opening files, selecting input fields, and cutting and pasting text. Those tasks can then be repeated for each prospective patient. The result: The paperwork got done in days instead of weeks.

HONG KONG – Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.'s ambitions to expand in the lucrative U.S. health care market led the drugmaker to begin a painstaking examination of Shire PLC's assets more than two years prior to striking a $62 billion deal. In particular, Shire's neuroscience unit and its gastrointestinal products sparked Takeda's interest. One hurdle, though, gave them pause: the steep purchase price. Then the tide turned in Takeda's favor. Shire's struggling stock performance after its failed sale to AbbVie Inc. and the acquisition spree that followed -- culminating with the $32 billion takeover of Baxalta Inc. -- frustrated investors and prompted concerns about its strategy.

Though last Sunday's Tokyo assembly elections garnered the most media attention, another contest came in a close second, even if only two people were involved. Fourteen-year-old Sota Fujii's record-setting winning streak of 29 games of shogi was finally broken on July 2 when he lost a match to 22-year-old Yuki Sasaki. Fujii has turned into a media superstar in the past year because of his youth and exceptional ability in a game that non-enthusiasts may find too cerebral to appreciate. The speed of Fujii's ascension to headline status has been purposely accelerated by the media, which treats him as not just a prodigy, but as the vanguard figure of a pastime in which the media has a stake. Press photos of Fujii's matches show enormous assemblies of reporters, video crews and photographers hovering over the kneeling opponents.

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.