NVIDIA and Innophore’s collaborative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven, drug safety screening platform CavitOmiX is set to launch in late January 2025, says Innophore CEO Christian Gruber.
The partnership was announced on 13 January at the 2025 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, where NVIDIA disclosed a number of new partners, strengthening its ties to AI in healthcare. According to Gruber, the jointly developed CavitOmiX platform leverages NVIDIA’s computing power and expertise to enhance in silico drug design through protein binding site analysis.
CavitOmiX builds on NVIDIA’s BioNeMo, DeepMind’s AlphaFold, Meta’s ESMFold, and Innophore’s own Catalophore platform. The platform enhances drug design using protein structure data to find hidden binding site matches between therapeutic molecules and human proteins. In an exclusive interview with Pharmaceutical Technology, Gruber said the tool could contribute to a revolutionary change in drug development, with Innophore aiming to reduce an estimated $140bn lost annually in failed development projects due to unforeseen adverse events.
The partnership with NVDIA has drastically upscaled the capacity of CavitOmiX to model drug interactions. “[NVIDIA] boosted our performance so that we can run five million predictions per second. We’ve been at a few hundred before.” said Gruber.
Following the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 signed into law by former US President Biden in December 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) eliminated the requirement for animal testing before human trials in clinical drug development. This, according to Gruber, has opened the door for tools like CavitOmiX to de-risk drugs before clinical trials, provided sufficient data can be obtained to generate reliable predictions of pharmacokinetics and possible side effects.
But Gruber notes that data availability may limit the application of AI tools in this way. Also passed under the Biden administration in September 2024 was the Biosecure Act, which would hamper the international exchange of biological data if signed into law, in particular between the US and China. Before this, Gruber noted that with the Covid-19 pandemic, “data sharing reduced dramatically”, as countries sought competitive advantage in their vaccine research.
Despite this, Gruber said Innophore is optimistic on the potential for CavitOmiX and other AI tools to transform the clinical development of drugs. The company’s collaboration with NVIDIA, he said, serves as a stepping stone to other partnerships with large pharmaceutical companies, as yet undisclosed, to further integrate Innophore’s AI protein modelling capabilities into clinical pipelines.
