Public Funding for Intelligent Omics Limited

Drug discovery is an expensive, time consuming, and unsustainable process requiring large teams, significant use of animal models, and extensive physical laboratory resources. The process is also prone to failure because many of the methods used are unrepresentative of the disease state or organism being targetted. Despite the significant investment of biological, technical, and financial resources into the High Throughput Screening (THS) process, the drop off rate is high with few contenders even reaching trials in human subjects. This resource requirement has meant that drug discovery has been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown of laboratory staff. We believe there is an alternative to this process using computer-based artificial intelligence-driven approaches here termed biologically driven In silico high throughput screening and drug discovery. With the MDC we are constructing a drug discovery pipeline based on existing artificial Intelligence in silico (computer-based) tools. These will be utilised in this project to identify alternative druggable targets for the KRas related pathway in lung cancer. This will be achieved through the application of the pipeline to high dimensional molecular data (transcriptomic) for lung cancer held in public repositories. We aim to identify a number of druggable contenders and associated small molecule-based compounds that can target these. We also will seek to validate the biological relevance of these through rapid automated cell line validation. The validation of this process will provide an alternative cost-effective sustainable approach to drug discovery which can be used with minimal resource constraints, reduced environmental impact, reduced costs, reduced use of animals, and human disease targetting. Thus we will circumvent many of the limitations of current HTS approaches. This will open up further opportunities for new cost-effective drug discovery allowing drugs to be developed in areas where there has traditionally been a lack of investment, such as rare or orphaned diseases.

Bovine tuberculosis (M. bovis) remains a major disease of cattle in the United Kingdom. The diagnosis and management of infected herds represents a significant burden to the UK taxpayer as bovine tuberculosis is a notifiable disease. Current testing regimens are laborious and time consuming, with blood samples needing to be transported to centralised testing facilities, where analysis and the reporting of findings can take a number of days. This makes rapid responses to infection difficult and costly. Within this project we propose the development and validation of a number of blood based biological markers which will subsequently be incorporated into a point of care device that can be used to rapidly obtain test results in the field. Such a device would have mobile phone/internet and global positioning system capabilities allowing results of tests conducted at a remote location to be uploaded rapidly to websites that communicate with regulatory authorities and facilitate herd management.