NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Insilico Medicine said this week that it will integrate unspecified data assets as well as the staff of InSilico Screen, a Belgian bioinformatics company that provides tools for dynamic signaling modelling and scalable molecular simulations.
Under the terms of the agreement, InSilico Screen Founder and CEO Quentin Vanhaelen will join Insilico Medicine as the head of the so-called "almost human" team. He will split his time between Baltimore, where InSilico Medicine has an office, and Brussels, where InSilico Screen is located.
Insilico Screen's assets include databases of kinetic protein interactions and models for signal transmission, regulation of cell metabolism, autophagy, and cell cycle, among others. It uses these to build models of human aging and regenerative processes that are then used to find new interventions and test existing ones on single cells through to entire organs.
InSilico Medicine provides in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing services focused on aging and age-related diseases to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. In addition the company provides contract research, data analysis, cross-platform harmonization, pathway activation analysis, biomarker development, clinical trials pipeline review and scoring, portfolio review, and other services to large pharma and cosmetics companies, hedge funds, academic institutions, and other organizations. It also pursues internal drug discovery programs in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, sarcopenia, and geroprotectors.
"With my models [Insilico Medicine] can use their real human data and biologically-relevant pathway activation algorithms with my time-series simulations for many applications, including deep learning," Vanhaelen said in a statement.
Last year, Insilico Medicine announced that it was expanding an existing collaboration with Champions Oncology. The purpose of the new partnership was to validate preliminary findings which showed that molecular signatures of patients' tumor grafts in mice resembled signatures in human patients before and after treatment. Early this year, Insilico Medicine signed a convertible bridge note agreement for an $800,000 convertible loan with venture capital fund management company Deep Knowledge Ventures.