MORGANTOWN — GATC West Virginia is breaking new ground in using artificial intelligence to craft new molecules to cure diseases, and in drastically reducing the staggering costs of developing and bringing drugs to market.
First, a little history to help understand its work.
GATC WV (our abbreviation) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Irvine, Calif.-based GATC Health, said GATC Health Chief Operating Officer Ty Lam. GATC is a “technology company enabling scientists to be smarter, faster,” with programmers and scientists across the country.
Lam is a Virginia native and had his eye on West Virginia, he said. GATC WV was one of the first tenants in WVU Innovation Corp.’s new headquarters — what was the Mylan plant. Space there offered GATC the opportunity to consolidate lab operations in Morgantown.
In March, the state Economic Development Authority and the Jobs Investment Trust approved a $5 million investment into GATC WV to bring jobs here and advance its work.
The company has received its first $2 million and will receive an additional $1 million for each 10 people it hires, Lam said. “We’re bringing talent back into the state and keeping talent in the state.”
Their first scientist hired here earned her Ph.D. at WVU but went to work out of state and wanted to come back.
Creating molecules
GATC has its first drug invention awaiting FDA trials, Lam said. It’s a potential breakthrough treatment for opioid use disorder. Another one, for PTSD treatment, is in the pipeline.
It creates drugs using its proprietary Multiomics Advanced Technology (MAT) platform. The definition of multiomics would require more definitions of all the words in the definition, but Lam painted a picture of what they do.
Drug development costs run from $160 billion to $200 billion per year, he said. It may cost $1 billion or more to get a single drug through the 10–12-year FDA approval process, and 95% of them fail.
It’s essentially a broken process dependent on trial and error, he said. He explained it in terms of locks and keys. The drug developers will consider particular cellular targets to address a disease cause and then create compounds — molecules — to bind with the target cells. The cell is the lock, and the molecule is the key. That takes four to six years.
They then synthesize the compound for per-clinical cellular testing, then animal testing, then human testing.
An early-stage biotech company might spend tens of millions on per-clinical trials, then need hundreds of millions more for clinical trials. “In this financial market that’s nearly impossible. … We’ve got thousands of diseases that are untreated, because there could be a great drug, but the guys didn’t get the funding.”
Big pharma doesn’t invent drugs, he said — it acquires the developers. “It basically takes entrepreneurship out of drug development.”
And if you’ve ever read a drug pamphlet or bothered to listen to the end of one of those drug commercials with the horrible jingles and dancing happy people, you’ll know that drugs can come with all kinds of side effects ranging from annoying to frightening, or even fatal.
The trial-and-error approach can’t anticipate those “off-target” effects, he said. They’re one key per lock. “The problem is almost every disease has multiple locks and you have to have a key that fits all the locks.”
So, he said, polypharma is the next phase in drug development. “With artificial intelligence we can find all the keys.” And create a master key of multiple compounds that fits all of those locks — and will be more efficacious, safer and have fewer side effects.
GATC’s MAT AI platform simulates human physiology and biochemistry, Lam said. With their opioid use disorder drug, the AI took the disease model, identified thousands of biomarkers and narrowed them down to about 70 causal markers, and them identified three therapeutic biomarkers.
“With the data in our platform we can predict what is a safe drug, what is an efficacious drug, what drug doesn’t have off-target effects even before it gets into the lab.”
Saving piles of money
GATC WV’s MAT modeling can be applied to any drug in development, Lam said. They can analyze it and write a detailed report on those aspects. “This was the missing piece that was needed for financial risk to go down to almost zero.”
That brings us to their pioneering approach to drug-development financing, and partner Medical and Commercial International (MCI) — an insurance underwriter based in London and a syndicate of Lloyd’s of London.
Lloyd’s, Lam said, has wanted to offer some type of insurance protection in this area for years.
So GATC and MCI have teamed to create clinical trial insurance coverage. This means that instead of a biotech entrepreneur having to sell off its equity to acquire the vast funds to move forward, it can take a loan, and the lender will be protected from failure by the insurance.
“We’re going to democratize the way drugs are developed,” he said.
MCI CEO Phil Trafford said in a release on the new offering, “Clinical trial funding insurance is a revolutionary new insurance product with huge unmet demand, and access to Lloyd’s will allow MCI to capitalize on this opportunity. Working side-by-side with lenders and investors, this new program will promote medical innovation and promises a level of risk assessment accuracy unparalleled in the industry.”
A third company involved in the process, Lam said, is Acrisure, an international financing and consulting firm that will be responsible for program sales and distribution. The biotech firm will work with Acrisure to agree to the terms of the loan before the data comes to GATC WV.
The firm will then send the drug data to MCI, who will send it to GATC WV, which will analyze the data and return it MCI to decide if they want to underwrite a policy.
Ben Canagaretna, Global Managing Director of Acrisure, said, “GATC’s AI has enabled this first-of-a-kind combination of financing protected by insurance in case the clinical trial is not successful. The early response from biotech companies and large brokerage firms for this product has exceeded our expectations, which represents the pent-up demand for this innovative financing program.”
Another plus, Lam said, is that if the biotech company fails in obtaining underwriting, it can be referred to GATC WV, which can use the AI platform to fix and rescue the drug,
Lam said GATC and one other drug in the pipeline go to clinical trials. After that, their vision is not to take any more drugs they invent past the synthesis stage. They would stop there and sell or license the drug for clinical trials.
Right now, under conventional methods, he said, it takes four to six years to synthesize a drug for trials. With MAT, they’ve cut it to less than two years, and they will get it down to 10-12 months.
Lam wrapped up the conversation with praise for GATC WV’s home state. West Virginia is seeking new and innovative industries, and has eliminated barriers to business. GATC is hoping to draw more companies here.
“We love West Virginia,” he said. “It’s a great state to work with.”
EMAIL: dbeard@dominionpost.com
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