A new start-up in the field of biotech was born this week in Israel - the company TenAcea, which develops an AI platform to accelerate the development of innovative drugs for incurable diseases such as Alzheimer's and targeted cancer treatments.
Behind the company stand no less than four global pharmaceutical giants: AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer and Teva, who will invest in the company, support it and even provide it with clinical data for the development of artificial intelligence models.
A young man who started walking thanks to an artificial intelligence chip.
AI creates wonders in the world of science and medicine Photo: Reuters
TenAcea was born in a slightly different way than most start-up companies.
The person behind the establishment of the company is the innovation laboratory AION Labs from Rehovot.
AION Labs operates in a unique concept of a studio for establishing start-up companies.
Unlike incubators and accelerators, which provide support and guidance to start-up companies at the beginning of their journey, AION Labs establishes companies from scratch with the aim of solving problems that are already known in the pharmaceutical world.
There are seven partners behind AION Labs: the four pharmaceutical giants as mentioned above, Amazon (provides cloud computing services used as an infrastructure for AI technologies), and two more venture capital funds, while the Innovation Authority also provides support for the project.
The pharmaceutical company Pfizer, one of the companies that developed the corona vaccine, will invest in a startup, photo: AP
In a conversation with Israel Hayom, AEON Labs CEO Mati Gil, a former executive at Teva, explained that "we are focusing on the place where artificial intelligence and machine learning can solve key problems in the fields of computational biology and chemistry."
Technologies that will answer these challenges may be A base for huge companies. The pharmaceutical companies recognize the uniqueness of human capital in Israel, and this is their way of establishing R&D (research and development) activity in the country."
CEO of AEON Labs, Mati Gil, photo: Elad Malka
Molecular glues that stick to bad proteins
Behind TenAcea are three entrepreneurs: Dr. Arnout Schepers from Holland, the company's CEO, Dr. Tomer Sidi, who will lead the AI field and Dr. Chen Lior, who will lead the bioinformatics field.
The platform they are developing is designed to accelerate a pioneering and promising approach in the world of drug discovery called "targeted protein degradation".
With this method, the natural "garbage disposal" mechanism of the cells is harnessed to remove proteins from the body, for example to neutralize damaged proteins such as those produced in cancer processes and degenerative neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as to attack proteins of viruses.
In the development of drugs based on targeted protein breakdown, scientists are constantly trying to develop molecular adhesives that will allow the designated enzyme to stick to the problematic protein and break it down.
Each type of disease requires the development of a dedicated "molecular glue", since proteins associated with different diseases are also different in shape.
From left to right: Dr. Tomer Sidi, Dr. Arnout Shapers and Dr. Chen Lior, photo: Elad Malka
Compared to the old method of discovering those molecular adhesives, which is mainly based on trial and error, TenAcea's platform harnesses AI and machine learning algorithms to identify interactions between pairs of proteins, which can form the basis of molecular adhesive treatments.
According to Gil, "This is a very hot field today in the pharmaceutical world, but the development of these adhesives involves expensive and lengthy processes. Innovation is needed to overcome some of the challenges, and this can be done through artificial intelligence."
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