![NuMedii will partner with Yale School of Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital on research designed to apply single-cell sequencing toward identifying novel precision therapies and biomarkers in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (pictured). [Pathology Education Informational Resource (PEIR) Digital Library]](https://www.insideprecisionmedicine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1785-696x464.jpeg "NuMedii will partner with Yale School of Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital on research designed to apply single-cell sequencing toward identifying novel precision therapies and biomarkers in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (pictured). [Pathology Education Informational Resource (PEIR) Digital Library]")
NuMedii said it will partner with Yale School of Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) on research designed to apply single-cell sequencing toward identifying novel precision therapies and biomarkers in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).
Under the collaboration, whose value was not disclosed, NuMedii will work with two researchers and their laboratories to identify novel therapeutic targets and biomarkers for IPF. The two are Naftali Kaminski, M.D., Boehringer-Ingelheim Endowed Professor of Internal Medicine, and Chief of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, Yale School of Medicine; and Ivan O. Rosas, MD, Associate Physician, BWH and Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School.
The collaboration is intended to combine a single-cell RNA sequencing data repository from patients with IPF with NuMedii’s Artificial Intelligence for Drug Discovery (AIDD) technology.
Developed at Stanford University, AIDD consists of hundreds of millions of structured molecular, pharmacological and clinical data points. AIDD combines the data with proprietary machine learning and network-based algorithms to discover and advance precision treatments, as well as biomarkers predictive of efficacy for subsets of patients, in therapeutic areas that include rare diseases such as IPF, as well as inflammation and oncology.
“The combination of NuMedii’s AIDD technology with this rich data repository will provide unparalleled discovery capabilities to uncover novel mechanisms, cell types, targets and biomarkers that we believe will be instrumental in identifying and developing precision therapies for orphan diseases like IPF,” NuMedii CEO Gini Deshpande, Ph.D., said in a statement.
AIDD is designed to rapidly discover systems-level connections between drugs and diseases by harnessing big data and artificial intelligence (AI). The technology is intended to improve on conventional ‘target-centric’ drug discovery approaches by facilitating the exploration of ‘poly-pharmacology’ profiles that can modulate effects on multiple disease pathways, and thus potentially improve therapeutic efficacy.
A Stanford University spinout established in 2010, NuMedii is applying AIDD in R&D collaborations with several global biopharmas and patient-centric organizations, with the goal of developing new treatments. Collaboration partners include drug developers Allergan, Astellas Pharma, and Boehringer Ingelheim, as well as the philanthropic organization Three Lakes Partners, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, Genomics Institute’s Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative.
“The data we will derive by molecularly profiling thousands of single cells in every patient’s sample will allow us to understand disease at an unprecedented resolution and should allow us to identify new cell types and biological mechanisms involved in IPF,” added Dr. Kaminski, who is also co-director of Yale’s Center for Pulmonary Precision Medicine (P2MED).
