Using AI Big Data to Engineer More Efficient Drugs to Treat Rare and Common Diseases with Chris Hart Creyon Bio

Empowered Patient Podcast

Chris Hart, Co-Founder, CEO, and President of Creyon Bio, is focused on engineering drugs rather than just discovering them through serendipity and traditional methods. Creyon is developing oligonucleotide medicines for rare and common diseases by applying AI and big data models of the molecular and genetic basis of diseases to develop safe and effective drugs more quickly.

Chris elaborates, "When we think about drug engineering versus drug discovery, we’re thinking about how we take this process that currently requires us to do trial-and-error identification of molecules that may be beneficial in the clinic to a place where we can say, can I build the right machinery, the right data, the right models, the right processes to go in and understand if I want to make this modulation within a cell, here’s the molecule that will do it and I can have confidence that it will be safe."

"In terms of drug engineering and the type of drug engineering that Creyon does, what made starting Creyon the right thing to do and why it’s the right time and the right time to do it is that the computing power does exist to crunch large numbers and do the analysis we need to do to build the right models. But what didn’t exist for us, and I don’t think it exists broadly in the industry, is the right data. So a major focus of what Creyon has been doing for the last four years has been on how we create the right data in an efficient way such that we can engineer drugs to have the properties we need them to have as drugs, which is to say safe and effective and not just bioactive."

"Our focus is oligonucleotide medicines, which generally are antisense oligos, siRNAs, and aptamers. This is a super-modality we often think about. What characterizes them is their polymeric nucleic acids that are chemically synthesized, and that’s our primary focus. The indications we’re going after are the upside of the medicines we make: they don’t constrain themselves naturally to a therapeutic area. We can think broadly about whether or not it’s an immunological disease or a neurological disease. We can use these medicines for any type of disease, and we can use them across the board regardless of whether it’s a rare or a common disease."

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