http://www.xconomy.c...ry-with-adimab/
Excerpt:
Google is the undisputed king of Internet search and advertising, but its second act as a company might be to invent a new computer model for efficiently discovering targeted antibody drugs.
“Google is committing incredible resources to it. Incredible resources,” says Tillman Gerngross, the founder and CEO of Lebanon, NH-based Adimab. “The infrastructure alone is in the millions of dollars of raw computational power.”...
Traditional antibody discovery is time-consuming and risky. Adimab has developed its advantage with a fast yeast-based model that can be used to synthesize hundreds of antibodies against a certain target in just eight weeks of work, compared with six to 18 months of labor with the traditional methods used in biotech labs around the world, Gerngross says. Once that work is done, the major drug companies still need to spend years of labor and hundreds of millions of dollars testing those drugs in animals and humans, determining which of these hundreds of candidates bind the best with the target and have the strongest effect against disease...
Based on the commitment Google has shown since it invested in Adimab in October, Gerngross says it may now be possible to identify the optimal antibody for clinical trials entirely “in silico.” That would subtract a huge amount of time and effort from the notoriously lengthy, and risky, wet lab drug development process.
If Google’s computing power can actually achieve this lofty goal, a customer will still have to come to Adimab with a specific target in mind, and Adimab will still perform its usual 8-week process to synthesize a batch of antibodies that binds with a particular target. The key difference will be in speeding up what comes later, by giving the pharmaceutical customer a precise idea of exactly which of those 100 antibodies has the best shot as a drug.
