London-based GlamorousAI Secures Grant From Innovate UK to Fund a £440k Project toward Development of New Treatments For Glioblastoma Multiforme.
GlamorousAI, a leading artificial intelligence biotech company pioneering innovation in small data drug discovery, and King’s College London enter into a collaboration to unlock new drug development opportunities for Glioblastoma Multiforme. The company announced today funding from Innovate UK to apply its AI-first platform, Rosalind, to the discovery of novel therapeutic targets, biomarkers and leads for Glioblastoma Multiforme.
Glioblastoma Multiforme is the most common and aggressive brain tumour in adults affecting more than 100,000 people annually. Despite multimodal therapy, the outcome for patients remains shockingly poor. Survival rate is desperately low at 12-18 months.
The multiple targets involved in promoting growth for this complex and deadly tumor is a major challenge for the development of treatments. This is why the team believes that AI and big data analysis can be transformative.
Combining GlamorousAI unique drug discovery technologies with King’s College London’s expertise in disease modeling and high-content screening, the teams aim to derive the comprehensive profile of the tumour in cancer patients, which has the potential to predict the efficacy of a host of new cancer medications. It will therefore make it possible to offer treating physicians personalised and improved therapy recommendations. For the first time, the team will integrate disparate and sparse multi-omics data and Rosalind’s Artificial Intelligence methods will be used to perform large data analysis and select the best treatment option for individual patients.
Glamorous AI CEO, Noor Shaker says “ The goal of GlamAI is to break new ground in applications of AI for drug discovery and accelerate the path to personalized medicine in labs around the world. We are very proud of the progress we’ve made so far to validate our approach. Through our partnership with King’s College London, GlamAI will collaborate with experts in glioblastoma multiforme and will secure access to disease cell-lines that best represent the tumor in patients. The funding received from Innovate UK is key to progress this highly innovative project and to accelerate the path to treatment for this deadly disease.”
Davide Danovi says 'building on our experience with image analysis and relevant human cell models, this is a unique opportunity for us to work with GlamAI on a truly multidisciplinary project focussing on a clear unmet need'.
GlamAI secured the funding in a very competitive Innovate UK call. Innovate UK received more than 400 applications and was able to fund only 18 projects.
About GlamorousAI
Glamorous AI is on a mission to bring drugs to every disease. GlamAI platform, Rosalind, uniquely addresses therapeutic areas where only limited data is available, making the technology applicable to 80% of therapeutic targets intractable by other approaches. GlamAI’s first program in oncology utilized the power of Rosalind to discover hit candidates for this debilitating disease. Rosalind discovered a novel small molecule in under 6 weeks and through testing only three compounds, a remarkable improvement on existing approaches.
Glamorous AI is working on a number of programs in oncology and neurodegeneration and also announced that it has entered into a research collaboration with Cardiff University focusing on Parkinson’s disease. The partnership will leverage Glamorous AI’s platform to discover novel compounds and optimise chemical properties against the disease.