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(3 June 2024) AnHorn Medicines, a company with an AI-based drug development platform focused on creating new drugs through protein degradation, has been invited to present its latest research at the NVIDIA AI Summit on June 5 in Taipei, Taiwan. This follows the company’s successful presentation of AI-accelerated protein degradation drug discovery results at the NVIDIA GTC global AI conference in San Jose, California, in March.

AnHorn Medicines will be the only Taiwanese pharmaceutical discovery company speaking at the summit. It will share its experience using a proprietary AI-based drug development platform and the NVIDIA BioNeMo generative AI platform for drug development. The company’s first innovative, patent-active new drug, designed with AI assistance, is set to apply for US-IND filing later this year.

AI applications in medicines show great promise, with the potential to drive the largest wave of medical breakthroughs after the Human Genome Project. In recent years, the rapid development of generative AI has enhanced scientists’ understanding of protein structures. Through AI, researchers can identify suitable drug interaction sites, enabling medicinal chemists to design corresponding drug molecule structures. One of the leading areas where AI is being applied is in the development of protein degraders, in which new small-molecule drugs are designed to modulate protein degradation processes. This innovative approach could lead to more targeted and effective treatments — many are currently in clinical trials.

Since the company was founded in 2020, AnHorn Medicines has established a research and development team that combines medicinal chemistry experts with AI specialists. Throughout the product development process, which applied generative AI for the design and development of new protein degradation drugs, the effectiveness of the company’s proprietary AI-assisted drug development platform was proven. AnHorn Medicines joined the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups in 2023, when it also began utilizing the NVIDIA BioNeMo generative AI platform for drug discovery applications such as protein structure prediction.

NVIDIA BioNeMo allows biomedical research institutions and pharmaceutical industry R&D and manufacturing companies to conduct drug discovery without investing heavily in powerful computer hardware. Using this cloud-based platform, these entities can explore drugs, as well as generate and design new chemical entities with potential medicinal properties.

Even with AI assistance, AnHorn Medicines’ team must possess extensive drug development experience and stay up to date on the latest information technology to continually adjust and calibrate during the development process, ensuring they harness the productivity and efficiency of AI. AnHorn Medicines is one of the few drug development companies in Taiwan, and internationally, capable of balancing both aspects.

AnHorn Medicines will present its research findings at the NVIDIA AI Summit on June 5, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m., at the Hanlai Hotel next to the Nangang Exhibition Center. The presentation, “AI’s New Frontier in Drug Development: Leveraging NVIDIA BioNeMo to Propel PROTAC Design,” will showcase the company’s latest breakthroughs. (Agenda link: https://www.nvidia.com/zh-tw/events/computex/).

Dr. Lin Chiu-Chiang, Chairman and CEO of AnHorn Medicines, stated, “The application of AI in medicine is about to enter a phase of tangible results. Using AI in drug development improves the accuracy of candidate drug screening and reduces or replaces real experiments, thus shortening the drug development timeline. This leads to cost reduction and increased success rates. The AnHorn team, through its self-developed AI platform, has developed two novel candidate compounds within just three years, providing clear evidence of AI’s potential.

We anticipate that this year (2024), AnHorn Medicines will apply for an Investigational New Drug (IND) filing for its first drug candidate. We hope that when AnHorn Medicines’s candidate drug enters the clinical stage, it will demonstrate the exceptional advantages of AI in new drug development, positioning AnHorn Medicines as a leading innovator in this field.”

About AnHorn Medicines

AnHorn Medicines is a biotechnology company developing a next-generation protein degradation platform that targets cellular disease-causing proteins. The company’s proprietary drug discovery platform provides a unique approach to rationally design bi-functional degrader and molecular glue to have differentiated drug profiles.

AnHorn Medicines was founded in 2020, headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan. The founder, Dr. Chu-Chiang Lin, has over 20 years solid experience in drug discovery and development. The drug discovery team consists of personnel in medicinal chemistry, structural biology, machine learning-based chemistry, and pharmacology, with the goal of launching “First in Class” new drugs.

For more information, please visit www.anhornmed.com and follow us on Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/company/anhorn-medicines/