Interview Questions for Garry Pairaudeau, the CTO of Exscientia
In a groundbreaking development for the pharmaceutical sector, UK-based firm Exscientia, led by Chief Technology Officer Garry Pairaudeau, is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate drug discovery and development.
Exscientia's innovative approach has proven to be five times faster than traditional methods, as demonstrated by the development of DSP-1181, the world's first AI-designed drug to be brought to the clinic, which took just 12 months as opposed to the usual 4 to 5 years.
The company's AI systems are designed to turn data into knowledge and create digital models of desired drug properties, optimising the drug discovery process. This precision engineering of potent and exquisitely designed drug molecules is made possible through Exscientia's use of Generative Methods.
Pairaudeau predicts that AI will become commonplace for drugs entering human clinical trials by the end of the decade, and he believes its role in drug development will be transformational.
Exscientia's platform delivers a significantly more rapid and cost-effective route to discovering drug candidates than the industry benchmark. The company's success is attributed to its ability to learn and move forward with the fewest number of experiments, even with sparse data.
Access to more and better-quality data is crucial for Exscientia, as it allows for a more rapid and cost-effective route to discovering drug candidates. Higher volume quality data enables the company to build better models of critical properties like toxicity or metabolism, and to prioritise molecules more effectively, shortening the pre-clinical drug discovery stage.
Exscentia's drug candidate for obsessive-compulsive disorder, DSP-1181, was developed in partnership with Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma and using Exscientia's proprietary AI platform Centaur Chemist.
Pairaudeau states that AI is particularly useful in drug discovery, injecting urgency into the entire drug research and development system, as was demanded during the COVID-19 pandemic for vaccines and antibody treatments. Exscientia aims to drive change in the drug discovery paradigm, with the goal of using AI to discover new drugs and to shorten the time it takes to bring life-saving treatments to market.
