Owkin has raised $11M(€9M) in a Series A round to fund its artificial intelligence platform for medical research and drug discovery.
Owkin, based in New York and Paris, was founded in 2016 to develop machine learning algorithms that can deal with the overabundance of information in biology to optimize the drug development process. The company has now raised a first round of funding to scale its technology platform, called Owkin Socrates, and search for pharma partners.
The platform can integrate molecular and imaging libraries with patient data to uncover complex patterns of biomarkers that cause a disease. The company claims that, unlike other platforms, Owkin Socrates uses a method called transfer learning that improved the learning capacities of the algorithm on a particular dataset after being exposed to other datasets.
The AI company is already working with the Institut Curie as well as with two big names in biopharma: Amgen and Actelion — the latter founded by Owkin co-founder’s father, Jean-Paul Clozel. The application of artificial intelligence algorithms to drug discovery and development seems to be becoming a big trend, with companies like BenevolentBio, Exscientia and e-Therapeutics starting to recruit big pharma to make use of their algorithms.
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