Highlights from BioEurope: Owkin's Wilfried Dang on AI trends in drug discovery

Coming back from an insightful week at BioEurope, our Business Development Director, Wilfried Dang, shared his thoughts on some of the latest trends in the field from the conference.

Patient subtyping is the key to precision medicine

Biotech and pharma companies have expressed significant interest in identifying specific patient subsets highly responsive to their molecule candidates with the best drug combination. Efficient subtyping is essential to realizing precision medicine, ending the time of one-size-fits-all treatments, and boosting the success rate of treatments in clinical trials and practice.

Read more in this article: Feb. 2022, eLife research article

Spatial transcriptomics will decode the complexity of the Tumour Micro Environment (TME)

Many assets currently in development in the oncology space have a key focus on turning the TME “hot” to allow better efficacy of checkpoint inhibitors such as PD1/PDL1. New technologies, such as spatial omics are revolutionizing our understanding of the TME. They will contribute to a better understanding of novel treatment responses and resistance mechanisms and discover new patient subtypes and drug targets.

Read more about spatial omics applied to the TME in this article: Aug. 2022, Inside Precision Medicine

Multimodal datasets are on the rise

The use of multimodal datasets to predict response and resistance to treatment is on the rise. Digitized histopathology, combined with maturing sequencing technologies (e.g., WGS and RNAseq), new technologies such as spatial omics, and the application of deep learning allow an integrative analysis of such datasets. This will lead to a deeper understanding of cancer complexity with spatial mapping of intratumoral heterogeneity, immune cell presence and other biological determinants. This will translate to better diagnosis and treatment. Read more in this article: Aug. 2022, Cancer cell

Owkin has unique access to multimodal patient data from the largest federated patient data network in the EU and US, such as histogenomic, single-cell RNAseq, and spatial transcriptomic data.

With prior knowledge and Owkin’s proprietary AI and expertise, Owkin and its partners can identify new targets, new indications, new drug candidates, and combinations to improve patient outcomes in cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases.

Learn about our strategic collaboration with Sanofi and Bristol Myers Squibb.