Leveraging collaboration and AI to advance groundbreaking research

Canada’s Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD) will use artificial intelligence to help facilitate the development of new therapeutic antibodies.

The CDRD will implement AI and predictive modeling software from Schrödinger to more efficiently and effectively develop high-quality humanized antibodies with ideal biophysical characteristics.

The drug discovery and development process is time-consuming, expensive and complex, requiring many partners with specialized expertise to advance a potential drug candidate into the clinic. Cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence offer a way to help process data faster and more accurately.

Gordon C. McCauley, CDRD president and CEO, says, “Schrödinger is a leader in applying AI to small molecule drug discovery, so we are excited to be a part of this unique collaboration to leverage those capabilities to now also develop biologics more efficiently and expeditiously. This collaboration also highlights the importance of CDRD’s collaborative approach in bringing together partners from academia—in this case the British Columbia Cancer Agency (BCCA)—and industry as we work to advance  groundbreaking research from bench to bedside.”

Schrödinger will provide its biologics modeling technology to triage and help prioritization through prediction of physicochemical liabilities, as well as to support antibody humanization via structure-based computational approaches. CDRD will furnish a portfolio of antibodies specific to a particular target, as well as accompanying key molecular and physicochemical lab measurements. The British Columbia Cancer Agency will provide critical biological data for the initial project, which will involve an immune checkpoint target that is present on cancer stem cells.