Relation Therapeutics Teams Up with Mila in Coalition to Identify COVID-19 Therapeutic Candidates

September 1, 2020

Relation Therapeutics is a drug development company driven by data science and machine learning (ML).

Relation Therapeutics today announces Project RE, which will apply Relation Therapeutics’ and its partners’ technology to the identification of repurposed drug combinations as potential therapeutic candidates for COVID-19. Project RE will focus on finding therapies to tackle viral entry and replication and is co-led between Mila (Quebec AI Institute) and Relation Therapeutics, with the overall scientific direction by Mila founder Professor Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award winner 2018). The project will also create a platform to develop therapies that appropriately modulate the immune response through distinct stages of infection with oversight from Relation’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr David Roblin. Funding for Project RE is provided by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Relation Therapeutics.

Relation Therapeutics and Mila will aim to leverage the most powerful machine learning techniques currently being deployed in the world’s largest tech companies and academia, to revolutionize computational drug development. In order to coalesce thought leadership in the space, Relation has strengthened its senior leadership team and SAB with five key appointments: Dr Charles Campbell Roberts, serial entrepreneur, has been appointed Chairperson; Dr David Roblin, COO Juvenescence and former Head of R&D for Pfizer Europe, has been appointed Chief Medical Officer: Professors Michael Bronstein, from Imperial and Twitter, and Will Hamilton and Jian Tang, both from Mila, have been appointed to the SAB.

Dr. Charles Campbell Roberts, Relation Therapeutics’ Chairperson, said: “Relation is honored to work with the Gates Foundation in seeking to rapidly identify COVID-19 therapeutic candidates. Graph ML is at the cutting edge of machine learning, underlying core recommender technologies at tech giants such as Pinterest and is a key research topic at DeepMind. Relation is amongst the first to deploy these approaches directly in drug development, and has been deeply fortunate in attracting so many of the leading scientists in the space to this mission.”

Professor Yoshua Bengio, Mila founder, said: “Using advances in machine learning we can integrate many sources of information about a disease, and build systems that improve over time using active learning. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has identified this approach as a perfect opportunity to use ML to correctly identify and evaluate potential drug combinations as therapeutic approaches for COVID-19, by searching colossal combinatorial space as fast as possible.”

Dr David Roblin, CMO, Relation Therapeutics, said: “Our race together is to beat COVID-19 and improve patient outcomes by identifying existing therapeutics that can be repurposed. To do this we have assembled an outstanding team with Mila and Relation data science, machine learning, biology and drug development expertise. This is essential funding to enable these efforts.”

Medical Device News Magazinehttps://infomeddnews.com
Medical Device News Magazine provides breaking medical device / biotechnology news. Our subscribers include medical specialists, device industry executives, investors, and other allied health professionals, as well as patients who are interested in researching various medical devices. We hope you find value in our easy-to-read publication and its overall objectives! Medical Device News Magazine is a division of PTM Healthcare Marketing, Inc. Pauline T. Mayer is the managing editor.

More News!

The Evolut ™ FX+ TAVR system leverages market-leading valve performance with addition of larger windows to facilitate coronary access
The study was an analysis of AstraZeneca’s Phase 2 52-Week clinical trial of tralokinumab in patients with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF). The patient data from the trial was processed with Brainomix’s e-Lung tool. The tool is uniquely powered by the weighted reticulovascular score (WRVS), a novel biomarker that incorporates reticular opacities and vascular structures of the lung.
“Since the algorithm for matching patients with donors is changing across for all organs, this was a prime time to better understand whether transplant team decisions to accept a donated organ varied by patient race and gender,” she said. “We wanted to understand how the process of receiving a transplant after listing varied by race and gender, and the combination of the two, so that steps can be taken to make that process more equitable," said Khadijah Breathett, MD.
The Mount Sinai study found that primary care physicians’ approach reflects a dearth of evidence-based guidance for lung cancer screening shared decision-making in patients with complex comorbidities
This is the first ever transplantation of a genetically engineered porcine kidney into a living human recipient.

By using this website you agree to accept Medical Device News Magazine Privacy Policy

Exit mobile version