Galactic hire as data science doyen joins Biorelate

Biorelate describes itself as a world leader in leveraging advanced data science methods to extract critical knowledge from vast amounts of pharmaceutical data and literature, significantly enhancing the discovery of novel biopharmaceuticals. It offers multiple product lines powered by its proprietary platform, Galactic AI™.

Galactic AI™ employs sophisticated natural language processing and artificial intelligence to uncover hidden cause-and-effect relationships. This provides what the company calls “unprecedented insights into disease pathways, enabling more precise and effective drug discovery.”

The Cambridge company adds: “As the incredible progress of scientific researchers continues to compound the huge volume of growing and evolving biomedical data, Biorelate’s mission to curate knowledge to advance the world's most promising biomedical innovations has never been so important.”

Dr Sidders boasts two decades of deep data science experience, honed across multiple therapeutic areas at Pfizer and AstraZeneca. He led teams that applied novel data science methods for drug discovery in oncology, neuroscience and infectious disease.

Biorelate specialises in advanced data science methods for drug discovery to deliver robust, evidence-based intelligence to those making critical decisions about the next drugs to take forward.

The actionable insights it distils, from across diverse ‘dark’ (previously unsearchable) knowledge assets and existing texts, ensure that investment is concentrated on the targets most likely to succeed in drug development - with a positive impact for patients, while delivering financially for the drug developer and its backers.

Dr Sidders, who has followed Biorelate closely since the company’s foundation in 2014, believes the company is at an important inflection point thanks to its proven technology and a significant opportunity to grow and scale. That’s as drug developers look to next-generation data science to transform their early research, and improve new drug candidates’ probability of success.

He said: “The pharmaceutical industry is rapidly adopting data science-driven approaches using artificial intelligence. This has meant a shift away from the traditional pharma R & D model (very low throughput, with heavy reliance on academic literature to determine new targets), towards an AI-first approach.

“The risk with this approach is that researchers do not really understand the causality of their findings, which is critical if you want to develop a successful drug.

“Biorelate fills that gap by drawing on a wealth of data to develop causal models and explaining - mechanistically and in the appropriate context – what the next opportunities are and why.

“Crucially, Biorelate’s technology platform has causality built in – something that’s lacking in other AI approaches to drug discovery. It has proven adept at finding new targets and has promise in other areas of the pipeline, from biomarker discovery and patient stratification to the identification of promising drug combinations. This is a really exciting time for Biorelate and for data science in drug discovery more broadly.”

Daniel Jamieson, Biorelate’s CEO, said: “Ben’s scientific direction will give Biorelate an even deeper footing within modern drug discovery and development. His extensive experience of all facets of drug discovery across major pharma add richly to his understanding of what the industry needs now to transform R & D performance – insights and expertise we can now extend to our diverse client base.”