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Recently, Cyclica, a CCAA investment enterprise of Zhongguancun Dahe Capital, was named one of the top 100 companies in the AI field in 2019 by the well-known magazine Analytics Insight. Also on the list are Google AI, IBM, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce and Chinese companies such as Shangtang Technology, Yitu Technology and Face++.

▲ Scan the code to browse the global top 100 enterprises in the AI field

A total of 11 enterprises in the field of health care were nominated in this selection. Including DeepMind, Zymergen, Freenome, Owkin, InSilicon Medicine, Atomwise, etc. Cyclica is one of them and the only medical enterprise in Canada. There are four other Canadian companies on the list, including Element AI, Automat.ai and integrated AI and Sportlogiq fully prove that Canada’s high-tech startups in the field of artificial intelligence can and have become world-class in all AI covered industries, including medical care.

Founded in 2013, Cyclica is a globally recognized biotechnology company headquartered in Toronto, Canada. The company uses artificial intelligence, computational biophysics, and biological data to reshape the drug discovery process, help pharmaceutical companies evaluate the safety and effectiveness of drugs, and optimize drug discovery pipelines. Cyclica’s proprietary structure based and AI enhanced drug discovery platform includes Ligand Design for multi intent and multi target drug design, and Ligand Express for off target analysis, system biological links, and structural drug genomics insights. Ligand Design and Ligand Express can be designed together to design advanced lead like molecules, so as to minimize unnecessary miss target effects, and comprehensively understand the molecular activity through integrated system biology and structural drug genomics.

▲ Ligand Express cloud computing platform (picture source: Cyclica)

You can understand that the Ligand Express platform provides a unique panorama of small molecules by identifying expected target and non target interactions, as well as unexpected interactions. Biophysical methods allow the system to go beyond conventional binding/active sites to consider new interaction and allosteric sites. This is impossible for artificial intelligence to predict only based on known information. It is worth mentioning that since its full launch in November 2017, the Ligand Express platform has been used by some of the world’s top 50 pharmaceutical companies.

Previously, Mr. Naheed Kurji, the founder of Cyclica, mentioned in an interview with WuXi AppTec that the main advantage of AI lies in its ability to significantly improve the speed of innovation and reveal new ideas and trends, which is very important. The amount of data and literature on disease biology is so huge that no scientist can read and understand them all. Through artificial intelligence, these information can be filtered to present the content related to scientists, and can be more effective than any independent scientist in information inference and prediction.

In drug research and development, AI helps to design better clinical trials and stratify different patient cohorts in a more organized way. Artificial intelligence will mainly affect the application of personalized drugs and pharmacogenomics. The biggest theme is that AI algorithms will eventually increase drug discovery and development and bring better treatment results to patients. Cyclica’s goal is to revolutionize a system plagued by wear and tear and costly failures, accelerate the drug discovery process, and develop drugs with higher accuracy.