On October 23, 2024 Rakovina Therapeutics Inc. (TSX-V: RKV), a biopharmaceutical company committed to advancing new cancer therapies based on novel DNA-damage response (DDR) technologies, reported that it has received initial results from the proprietary Deep Docking AI platform (Press release, Rakovina Therapeutics, OCT 23, 2024, View Source;utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rakovina-therapeutics-announces-initial-drug-candidates-from-deep-docking-ai-molecule-discovery-platform [SID1234647340]).
Schedule your 30 min Free 1stOncology Demo!
Discover why more than 1,500 members use 1stOncology™ to excel in:
Early/Late Stage Pipeline Development - Target Scouting - Clinical Biomarkers - Indication Selection & Expansion - BD&L Contacts - Conference Reports - Combinatorial Drug Settings - Companion Diagnostics - Drug Repositioning - First-in-class Analysis - Competitive Analysis - Deals & Licensing
Schedule Your 30 min Free Demo!
Rakovina employed the Deep Docking algorithm to evaluate billions of molecular structures to develop a short-list of drug candidates that have been optimized to a specific target-product profile. A screening effort of this magnitude would not be possible with traditional medicinal chemistry approaches.
"With the Deep Docking AI platform, these initial results were achieved in less than five months versus traditional methods of discovery which would take thousands of years," said Rakovina Therapeutics Executive Chairman Jeffrey Bacha. "AI dramatically increases speed and the likelihood of success of our drug discovery platform," he added.
"We are pleased to receive this short-list of recommended drug candidates from our initial AI screening effort," said Bacha. "Our excitement is similar to receiving a core sample from a promising mining project, but instead of rare metals, this sample contains a curated list of potential novel best-in-class drug candidates that could provide significant improvements in the treatment of cancer for patients worldwide."
Selected drug candidates will be synthesized for validation in Rakovina Therapeutics’ laboratories at the University of British Columbia during the coming months with the goal of advancing a best-in-class DDR drug candidate to human clinical trials in collaboration with pharmaceutical company partners.
In March 2024, the Company announced that it was entering into a collaboration agreement with Dr. Artem Cherkasov, granting Rakovina Therapeutics exclusive access to the Deep Docking AI Platform for DNA-damage response targets. Dr. Cherkasov is a professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a senior scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre. These results are the initial output of the ongoing collaboration.
The goal of the collaboration is to leverage AI algorithms to analyze billions of potential drug candidates, with the goal of accelerating discoveries, reducing costs, and improving the success rate in identifying best-in-class drug candidates in the DNA-damage response field. The agreement provides Rakovina with ownership rights to all novel drug candidates generated through the collaboration.
Rakovina Therapeutics will present the initial results of this research in a poster presentation at the Society for Neuro-Oncology Annual Meeting, which is being held November 21 through 24, 2024, at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas.
Additionally, in Sept. 2024, the Company announced an agreement with Variational AI of Vancouver to leverage the capabilities of the Enki AI platform which has been trained to identify novel inhibitors of specific kinase targets in the DDR field. Rakovina Therapeutics expects initial results from this research in the next several months.