Multi-year research collaboration and software agreement reimagines
the discovery and clinical development of medicines through data sciences
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–nference,
a leader in knowledge synthesis software solutions for the life sciences
industry, today announced a multi-year alliance with Janssen Research &
Development, LLC that will leverage the nference artificial
intelligence (AI) platform to create a unified data science-powered
connective fabric across the Janssen R&D organization.
“We are thrilled to be advancing this strategic alliance with Janssen
R&D for connecting biological information to disease condition and
therapeutic mechanisms. By pairing the unique data science technologies
enabled by the nference platform with the renowned institutional
expertise of Janssen R&D, we seek to unearth answers to complex research
questions and solve urgent business needs. This is enabled via an agile
data science-enabled business platform and a living software kernel that
continually synthesize public as well as proprietary knowledge across
therapeutic areas and global support functions,” said Venky
Soundararajan, Ph.D., Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of nference.
George
Church, Ph.D., who joins as Chairman of the nference
Scientific Advisory Board, added, “This alliance heralds the coming
together of breakthrough machine intelligence, profound biomedical
insights and iterative software application development to power drug
discovery, disease stratification and clinical development for one of
the largest pharmaceutical companies.” Dr. Church, Professor at Harvard
Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is widely
recognized as a founding father of human genome sequencing (including
next-generation sequencing, nanopores) and for genome editing (CRISPR),
writing, recoding and the world’s only open-access personal precision
medicine databases.
The nference-Janssen R&D collaboration will span a wide array of
applications. The discovery and early development applications include
uncovering and prioritizing novel targets and disease subsets that will
foster competitive therapeutic programs beyond the conventional disease
area stronghold definitions. Some of the clinical development
applications being pursued collaboratively are focused on enhancing
effectiveness (e.g., stratifying patients to identify those with
profound unmet medical need and who are most likely to respond to each
drug candidate) as well as efficiencies (e.g., identifying the optimal
sites and investigators for advancing clinical trials across leading
hospitals). Additional collaborations being explored span multiple
related functions (e.g., R&D compliance, regulatory affairs and medical
safety).
To support this broad array of collaborations, nference has
developed a holistic data science kernel that will synthesize some of
the Janssen R&D proprietary databases with real-time insights gleaned by
the core nference AI platform from the world’s public biomedical
knowledge bases. This will include synthesis of unstructured,
semi-structured and structured data sets that evolves and learns
continuously as expert- and machine-curated insights are fed into the
platform by nference and Janssen R&D scientists. The concomitant
pursuit of diverse research collaborations and the advancement of a
comprehensive software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform are expected to
produce meaningful synergies that are truly distinctive in the
pharmaceutical industry.
About nference
Powered by its artificial intelligence
software platform, the nference mission is to synthesize the
exponentially growing biomedical knowledge. nference uses
state-of-the-art neural networks (shallow and deep learning models) for
real-time, automated extraction of insights from the scientific,
regulatory and commercial data sets. The platform enables a diverse set
of applications ranging from R&D to commercial strategy and operations
in the life sciences ecosystem. nference is making biomedical
knowledge computable, and building its AI platform to serve as the
connective fabric for various silos of information that exist in
unstructured and structured form across health care enterprises. nference
has also established a Joint Venture (Qrativ) with the Mayo Clinic for
AI-driven drug purposing in rare diseases. nference is backed by
Matrix Partners, Matrix Capital Management, and Mayo Clinic Ventures.
For more information, visit nference.ai.
Contacts
Lauren Arnold
MacDougall
781-235-3060
larnold@macbiocom.com