Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has made a strategic investment, through Accenture Ventures, in Turbine, a predictive simulation company that is building a platform for interpreting human biology. Accenture’s investment will help Turbine further extend its capabilities to global biopharma companies that can benefit from Turbine’s ability to uncover hidden biological insights, with the potential to guide and accelerate key drug development workstreams.
Turbine’s core technology, the Simulated Cell™ platform, utilizes machine learning to understand how human cells make decisions. The platform intricately models molecular interactions within and around cells, enabling virtual experiments in volumes that are nearly impossible to achieve in the physical world and revealing mechanisms that drive diseases and response to therapies.
“Advanced technology and digital capabilities are clearly becoming substantial differentiators in the biopharma industry, and the future of drug discovery will be powered by AI,” said Tom Lounibos, global lead of Accenture Ventures. “Turbine’s AI-based platform has clearly demonstrated the ability to unlock high-quality biological insights for our clients across the biopharma industry.”
Turbine’s platform is being validated with leading pharma companies to uncover promising drug targets, select patient populations most likely to benefit from therapy, and identify combination therapy regimens that can increase therapeutic benefit in certain patients. This allows Turbine to reveal treatments otherwise hidden from view, as well as potential drugs that work in the lab but would likely fail in clinical trials.
Petra Jantzer, Ph.D., a senior managing director and global lead of the Accenture Life Sciences business, said, “Turbine’s Simulated Cell™ platform has emerged as a valuable tool for global biopharma companies to gain insights into the intricacies of biological systems, which can lead to the development of targeted treatments. Our investment reflects our commitment to supporting technology and digital capabilities that drive innovation in AI-based drug discovery, all with the goal of providing more effective treatments and enhancing patient care.”
“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.”
Turbine is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program focused on working with companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. Project Spotlight offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients, helping startups harness creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology. Additional digital simulation companies in Project Spotlight include QuantHealth, Virtonomy and Ocean Genomics.
Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
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Countless resources and time get expended globally to research and advance novel therapies that end in clinical failure and no patient benefit. Imagine a world where it is possible to predict any potential drug’s effect on translatable biological models – including those that may not even be available for lab-based testing – while accurately representing patient biology. Turbine is revolutionizing the status quo by working to ensure that we always run the right wet lab experiments.
With machine learning that understands the logic by which human cells make decisions, Turbine has built the world’s first predictive simulation of patient biology. The Simulated Cell™ platform models the protein signaling that decides cell fate and facilitates in silico experiments at scales that are impossible in the physical world, to empower the biopharma industry by guiding experiments that identify and confirm disease driving mechanisms.
Turbine’s platform is being validated through past and ongoing collaborations with leading pharma companies such as AstraZeneca, Ono Pharmaceutical, Cancer Research Horizons, and Bayer. In addition, Turbine has received funding from industry leaders such as MSD (Merck & Co, Inc. Rahway NJ, USA) Global Health Innovation Fund, Accel, and MassMutual Ventures, among others.
For more information, visit www.turbine.ai or follow Turbine on LinkedIn.
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