Biorelate Ltd offers free access to AI drug discovery tool

The company is granting researchers free use of cloud-based Galactic AI technology while the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact labs worldwide.

Biorelate has announced it is offering scientists around the world access to its Galactic cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) Tool. The company plans to continue offering the technology at no cost while the pandemic continues to impact laboratory access.

According to the company, systematic analysis of data available on targets, drugs and disease mechanisms from data repositories and academic papers can take more than a year on average. Galactic’s cognitive computing platform reportedly speeds research by collecting and curating more than 30 m biomedical research text sources.

Daniel Jamieson, Biorelate CEO and founder, said the pandemic is causing interruptions in a number of ways, including a significant shifting of remaining resources on pursuit of COVID-19 therapies.

“Our platform auto-curates knowledge, helping researchers across all disease areas make better use of all the existing and emerging scientific data locked away in text. We very much hope that with the release of Galactic, a browser-ready search engine to our platform, researchers will be able to take advantage of potential insights into focal points of research, such as drug targets and indications, at a time when they are more limited to desk-based activities?,” Jamieson said.

With up to 80% of biomedical data thought to be unstructured, he explained, the platform is engineered to help researchers to generate a clearer view of the current state of research and gain insights.

In a recent open letter to researchers, Cancer Research UK noted the slowdowns caused by COVID-19 could have a devastating effect on cancer patients.

“Universities are partially closed, laboratories have wound down their activities, experiments have stopped. Researchers are continuing to work productively from home, writing papers, analysing data, pulling together collaborations, reading the literature and generating ideas, but the progress of research will slow down, and this will inevitably have an impact on researchers’ careers and the lives of people affected by cancer?,” the letter explained.

Biorelate chairman Kevin Cox said such technology could be helpful in enabling drug developers and partners to continue their work.

“We’re pleased to be offering free access to the Galactic web app at a time when researchers are in desperate need of this kind of resource and support. We have had very positive feedback from early adopters, who are using the tool to find causally related data and perform systematic and pragmatic reviews?,” Cox said.

Users navigate through portals to explore research, experts, organizations and various insights. They then can harness the information form hypotheses and make predictions; larger enterprises can opt for greater functionality to input their own content and in-house designed ontologies.