School of Biomedical Sciences is pleased to invite you to join the following seminar:

Date: Monday, 20 September 2021

Time: 4:00 pm

Via Zoom: https://hku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEud-mrqTooH933e89ZJV34NW2mnCA6-K8j

Meeting ID: 953 0037 1259

Password: 183793

Speaker: Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder & CEO, and Dr. Frank Pun, Associate Director (Project & Operations)

 

Title of Talk	Speaker
AI Innovation in Drug Discovery	Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov Founder & CEO, Insilico Medicine
PandaOmics - an AI-driven Biological Target Discovery Platform	Dr. Frank Pun Associate Director (Project & Operations), Insilico Medicine

 

Biography

Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov

Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery and biomarker development. He is also the founder of Deep Longevity, Inc, a spin-off of Insilico Medicine developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity servicing healthcare providers and life insurance industry. Since 2015 he invented critical technologies in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) for generation of the novel molecular structures with the desired properties and generation of synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered the applications of deep learning technologies for prediction of human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. Under his leadership Insilico raised over $300 million in multiple rounds from expert investors, opened R&D centers in Baltimore, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Moscow, and St Petersburg, and partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions. Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (GPU company acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012 he published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers, and 2 books including “The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy” (Macmillan, 2013). He serves on the editorial boards of Trends in Molecular Medicine, Aging Research Reviews, Aging, Frontiers in Genetics, and founded and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research, Drug Discovery and AI Forum (8th annual in 2021), the world's largest event on aging in the pharmaceutical industry. He has two undergraduate degrees in computer science from Queen's University (Canada), Masters in Biotechnology from Johns Hopkins, and PhD in Physics and Mathematics from Moscow State University. In December 2020 he developed and launched an online Longevity Medicine Course for Physicians taken by over 3,000 medical professionals. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Dr. Frank Pun​

Dr. Frank Pun is the Associate Director, Project & Operations of Insilico Medicine HK Ltd. He is leading a team of application scientists in Hong Kong working on the AI-enabled biological target discovery platform - PandaOmics. His goal is to deliver the latest AI technology to scientists, medical doctors, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies around the world to help find actionable therapeutic targets, and accelerate drug discovery and development. Before joining Insilico, Frank was the CEO of PharmacoGenetics Ltd., a biotechnology company in Hong Kong focusing on genomic sequencing and diagnostic product development. Frank received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2010. Upon graduation, Frank served as a visiting scholar, leading a team to study human CNS diseases and cancer for years. Afterward, he received his MBA from Rutgers Business School in the US.

 

Abstract

Insilico Medicine is one of the world leaders in AI for drug discovery. The company integrates two business models providing AI-powered drug discovery services and software through its Pharma.AI platform and developing its own pipeline of preclinical programs. One major component of the Pharma.AI software suite is PandaOmics - an AI-driven biological target discovery platform. Basically, it has two main functions. First, end-to-end OMICS data analysis. The system allows us to input omics data for differential expression analysis and pathway analysis. Second, actionable therapeutic target identification. The system supports target exploration starting from a disease of interest, applying the AI hypothesis generation system to rank all related genes, taking into account all OMICs datasets stored in the system as well as any connections from our text database. With PandaOmics, we can find promising targets and new hypotheses for our research projects in only a few clicks. No bioinformatics knowledge is required. It is a very useful tool for all biologists and medical scientists.

 

ALL ARE WELCOME

Should you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact Miss River Wong at 3917 9216.