What You Should Know:
– Accenture Ventures, the venture capital arm of Accenture, has announced a strategic investment in Turbine, a company pioneering the use of predictive cell simulations for drug development.
– The investment aims to empower Turbine in extending its innovative technology to global biopharmaceutical companies seeking to unlock hidden biological insights and accelerate crucial drug development processes.
Optimizing Drug Discovery with Simulated Cells
Turbine’s core technology, the Simulated Cell™ platform, leverages machine learning to decipher human cell decision-making processes. By intricately modeling molecular interactions within and around cells, the platform facilitates virtual experiments on a massive scale, exceeding the capabilities of the physical world. This unveils disease mechanisms and treatment response patterns with unprecedented detail.
Unlocking Hidden Gems: More Effective Treatments
Leading pharmaceutical companies are collaborating with Turbine to validate its platform for several key applications:
- Identifying Promising Drug Targets: Turbine’s technology helps pinpoint potential targets for drug development, accelerating the discovery of new treatments.
- Optimizing Patient Selection: By predicting which patients are most likely to benefit from a therapy, Turbine allows for personalized medicine approaches with higher success rates.
- Developing Effective Combination Therapies: The platform can identify synergistic combinations of therapies, potentially enhancing treatment efficacy for specific patient populations.
Turbine’s capabilities offer the potential to reveal previously unseen treatment possibilities and eliminate drugs that might fail in clinical trials despite showing promise in the lab.
Project Spotlight: Fostering Innovation in Digital Simulations
Turbine joins Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, a program designed to foster collaboration and investment in companies driving disruptive enterprise technology. Project Spotlight grants access to Accenture’s industry expertise and extensive network of clients, empowering startups like Turbine to transform their technology into real-world solutions. Other digital simulation companies within Project Spotlight include QuantHealth, Virtonomy, and Ocean Genomics.
“Since most unsolved complex diseases are heterogenous, progress in utilizing AI for drug discovery is hindered by ethical and technological limitations in sourcing deep and diverse ground truth data. To bridge this gap, we need a toolkit that can learn fundamental rules of biology on in vitro experiments and apply to patients that it has never seen before. Turbine’s Simulated Cells can be engineered at scale to represent the heterogeneity of complex human disease better than currently available wet lab experimental models, which are inherently biased towards representing certain disease types and hardly scalable,” said Szabolcs Nagy, co-founder and CEO of Turbine. “By tapping into Accenture’s expertise, we hope to expand our market reach and augment our simulation platform in order to benefit the whole biopharma industry by ensuring that the next experiment is always the correct one.”
