MagicMed Industries Inc (CSE:MGIC) announced a new collaboration Thursday with two artificial intelligence experts to build PsyAI, a new tool designed to provide predictive and validating methodologies for psychedelic medicine.
MagicMed will be working with Drs Suran Goonatilake and Eric Nyberg, who the company described as “thought leaders in artificial intelligence”.
Goonatilake, a visiting professor at the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and co-founder of April 19 Discovery Inc, has a track record in developing new AI methods and applying them to address some of the world’s hardest problems.
READ: MagicMed CEO says firm is riding 'excellent momentum' in developing its Psybrary molecular derivatives library
Nyberg is the chief data scientist at Cognistx and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He was a member of the original IBM Watson development team and helped create scalable architecture for multi-strategy question-answering systems.
Calgary-based MagicMed is planning to leverage PsyAI with its proprietary novel molecule creation platform Psybrary to accelerate the development of optimized pharmaceutical candidates, with each tailored specifically for hard-to-treat mental health disorders.
The company’s chief scientific officer Dr Peter Facchini called it an “exceptional opportunity” for MagicMed to collaborate with two internationally-respected AI experts.
“Dr Suran Goonatilake and Dr Eric Nyberg, whose ground-breaking developments have helped shaped aspects of AI for decades, have agreed to join us in solving a fundamental challenge: the quest to develop new therapies for devastating mental health conditions,” Facchini said in a statement.
“I am honoured to collaborate with Dr Nyberg to take MagicMed’s library of psychedelic compounds - PsybraryTM – and apply deep-learning methods to move them along the pipeline towards APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients),” Goonatilake said. “We believe that every AI module increases the value of a compound as a potential therapeutic by leveraging AI systems to replace human scientists and thereby reducing the time and cost to bring a therapeutic to market.”
The group will aim to build upon a classification and clustering matrix and ultimately deploy a tier-based model that designs structures, optimizes synthesis processes, and predicts biophysical properties from receptor binding and pharmacology and toxicology through to patient outcomes in distinct clinical indications, according to Eric Nyberg.
Nyberg added: “It is my view that the need in society has never been greater for great minds to come together and pool resources to solve a serious and growing problem in society…I believe that the need for, and thus value of, the development of this new tool we are building to revolutionize the psychedelic medicine sector cannot be overstated.”
MagicMed plans to partner with pharmaceutical and other companies to develop and commercialize psychedelic-derived pharmaceutical candidates.
Contact Angela at angela@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow her on Twitter @AHarmantas