Hanmi Science has recently launched the “Lightspeed Task Force” to develop Covid-19 treatment and vaccine using other biotech companies’ AI technologies and digital therapeutics platform.
an AI-based new drug developer, will share its drug repurposing technology with Hanmi Science. Herings, a digital therapeutics firm, will design a clinical study. On Jan. 6, Hanmi Science said the Lightspeed TF would fight against Covid-19 with open innovation and vowed to build an innovative business model.
On Thursday, Syntekabio said it signed an agreement with Hanmi Science to develop Covid-19 treatment using drug repositioning technologies. The agreement is valid for two years until January 13, 2023, and Syntekabio will receive 1 billion won ($911,672) research expense from Hanmi Science.
In September, Syntekabio and Hanmi Science signed a memorandum of understanding to discover a Covid-19 treatment candidate through drug repositioning.
Under the latest deal, Hanmi Science will cooperate in clinical trials of Syntekabio’s Covid-19 drug candidates. Syntekabio is conducting a preclinical study on the combination of zafirlukast and sulfinpyrazone. Zafirlukast is a leukotriene receptor blocker, and sulfinpyrazone is a platelet aggregation inhibitor.
Using its AI solution, “Deep-matcher,” Syntekabio will verify the effective binding between Hanmi Science’s treatment candidate and the target and development feasibility. This signals that the two companies will discover a target and a drug candidate in an “in-silico” experiment via computer simulation, instead of in-vitro or in-vivo.
The two companies also plan to collaborate on developing a platform for digital therapeutics for clinical treatment. This is part of Hanmi Science’s willingness to build a platform that serves as a clinical treatment guideline, observers said.
“Clinicians will accumulate data about patients with which symptoms need which prescriptions. We’re trying to create a platform where doctors can reference such data to provide care and prescription more conveniently,” an official at Syntekabio said. “And this does not necessarily apply to Covid-19 treatment only.”
Nam Byung-ho, CEO of Herings, also revealed what role the company would play in Hanmi Science’s Lightspeed TF in a contributing article to the Korea Biotechnology Industry Organization on Monday.
Nam said doctors need to offer customized multi-drug prescriptions based on sufficient understanding of Covid-19 patients. Using AI technology, people could use “digital assistance” that helps prescribe multiple drugs and diagnose Covid-19 accurately, he said.
“New variants of the Covid-19 virus keep coming, which could limit the effect of investigational vaccines and treatments,” Nam said. As it is difficult to control Covid-19 with a single drug or vaccine due to the nature of Covid-19, where each patient has different symptoms and constant mutations of the virus, Lightspeed TF aims to develop new types of treatment methods using AI and digital therapeutics, he said.
Based on personalized immunity information, the task force could build a model to predict which vaccine is safe for a particular person among various vaccines of AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Moderna, according to Nam. Also, the new model will be able to monitor adverse reactions, he added.
To do so, Nam emphasized that the task force should collect real-world data from Covid-19 patients at hospitals and community treatment centers in real-time. He said he would request a preliminary review meeting with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and take detailed steps to push for the task force’s project.
Other biotechs and IT firms, including Coree Therapeutics, Bio App, and EvidNet, have also joined Hanmi Science’s Lightspeed TF to develop a customized Covid-19 treatment using digital therapeutics.