NuMedii Collaborating with Teams of Experts to Develop Precision Therapies for IPF

NuMedii will collaborate with researchers at Yale School of Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital to develop precision therapies and biomarkers for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).

Under this strategic research collaboration, the company will work with teams of two leading experts in interstitial lung disease: Naftali Kaminski, MD, a professor of internal medicine and chief of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at Yale School of Medicine, and; Ivan O. Rosas, MD, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

The collaboration brings together a large repository of single-cell RNA sequencing data, which integrates information about both the sequence and the quantity of each RNA molecule, from IPF patients and NuMedii’s area of technology called Artificial Intelligence for Drug Discovery (AIDD).

NuMedii’s AIDD technology involves diverse AI methods, ranging from classical machine learning approaches to a new subfield called deep learning, a method in which each step is based on what is “learned” from the previous one.

With AIDD, the company uses hundreds of millions of molecular, pharmacological and clinical data points, which are coupled with NuMedii-developed algorithms (sets of rules that computers use to solve mathematical problems) to find and develop treatment candidates and biomarkers for clinical research in IPF and other disorders.

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“The combination of NuMedii’s AIDD technology with this rich data repository will provide unparalleled discovery capabilities to uncover novel mechanisms, cell types, targets and biomarkers that we believe will be instrumental in identifying and developing precision therapies for orphan diseases like IPF,” Gini Deshpande, PhD, CEO at NuMedii, said in a press release.

Deshpande emphasized the company is “excited” to partner with Kaminski and Rosas to help advance NuMedii’s research in IPF, a condition with “a significant unmet medical need,” he noted.

“Our teams have been at the forefront of analyzing human IPF samples using high throughput technologies for many years,” said Kaminski, who also is a member of NuMedii’s recently created advisory board. He added that the molecular profiling of thousands of cells from patients’ samples “will allow us to understand disease at an unprecedented resolution and should allow us to identify new cell types and biological mechanisms involved in IPF.”

Rosas said the combination of scientific research with NuMedii’s data analytics and drug discovery capabilities may boost “the translation of our research into new precision therapies that will help patients with IPF and the physicians who treat them.”

In April 2017, NuMedii announced a development partnership with investment and philanthropic organization Three Lakes Partners to further its goal of finding new IPF therapies based on AIDD.