JW Pharmaceutical said on Monday that it would develop raw materials for new drug candidates with Merck Life Science using an artificial intelligence (AI) platform based on a mutual business agreement.
Under the agreement, Merck will provide its AI software, SYNTHIA, to JW Pharmaceutical and provide consultation on the know-how of new material synthesis through its custom synthesis lab (CS Lab).
SYNTHIA retrosynthesis software is an advanced technology introduced by large pharmaceutical companies in North America, Europe, and Japan in 2019, that quickly and accurately analyzes and presents chemical synthesis methods in the early stages of new drug development.
The AI program was developed by professional chemical researchers.
Accordingly, JW Pharmaceutical’s raw material research center will actively utilize SYNTHIA to reduce the time to synthesize small molecules needed in the early stages of new drug development. Moreover, the cost to prepare compounds used in non-clinical and clinical trials can be also reduced by about 60 percent, said a company official.
Based on SYNTHIA’s synthesis conditions, the company said it plans to establish an unmanned laboratory environment in which robots synthesize raw materials 24 hours a day.
“SYNTHIA can derive solutions with more than 100,000 rules and sophisticated algorithms and can be used not only for drug development but also for patent applications and dissertations,” said Merck Life Science and Lab Solution Business CEO Lee Nam-gu. “As Korean pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies such as JW Pharmaceutical are actively strengthening their pipeline using AI, we look forward to contributing to open innovation in the industry.”
“We are conducting various open innovation activities with biotech companies using innovative AI technology to strengthen new drug discovery through our R&D platform,” JW Pharmaceutical CEO Shin Young-sub said.
