Cambridge, 28 January – Ignota Labs is honored to announce that it has been selected for the prestigious Sanofi iDEA-Tech Award 2023-2024, a global competition aimed at accelerating breakthroughs in pharmaceutical R&D through the use of cutting-edge AI and data-driven solutions.
This recognition places Ignota Labs among the elite 6.8% of applicants who were successful in this year’s rigorous selection process. The award consists of €120,000 in funding and dedicated support from Sanofi’s expert team. This partnership will empower Ignota Labs to advance its groundbreaking SAFEPATH platform, a proprietary AI-driven tool designed to address critical safety challenges that often derail drug development. By combining financial resources with Sanofi’s scientific guidance, the collaboration aims to accelerate innovation and maximise the platform’s impact.
The awarded project, “Determining the Mechanistic Pathways of Hepatotoxicity Liabilities in Small Molecule Drug Projects Using AI,” focuses on addressing hepatotoxicity, a leading cause of drug failures. By integrating bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and advanced deep learning models, SAFEPATH identifies the root causes of toxicity, paving the way for safer drug candidates and faster development timelines.
“This award is a validation of our mission to turn around failed drugs and provide new hope for patients,” said Dr. Jordan Lane, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Ignota Labs. “Partnering with Sanofi—an innovative global healthcare company—offers an incredible opportunity to further our vision of transforming drug safety using AI.”
“Ignota Labs offers an alternative solution to integrate various types of toxicity data into a unified causal network framework. We hope to better understand underlying mechanisms that cause organ toxicity with SAFEPATH, which would lead to a more robust risk mitigation and management plan for existing and new drugs.” commented Dr. Panuwat Trairatphisan, Principal Scientist and Sanofi Champion of the iDEA-TECH Award project.
About Ignota Labs
Ignota Labs rescues promising but failing drugs, bringing new life to abandoned projects and new hope to patients. More than half of all clinical trials fail due to safety issues, resulting in a staggering $400 billion annual loss and delaying life-saving treatments for patients. Our proprietary platform, SAFEPATH, uses cutting-edge deep learning to address these challenges by uncovering the mechanisms behind drug toxicity. Unlike traditional safety assessments that identify what went wrong, our AI platform SAFEPATH combines cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and multimodal data analysis to explain why and how safety issues occur, delivering actionable insights to refine or repurpose drug candidates. Ignota Labs is building a robust pipeline to bring safer drugs to market faster, partnering to develop and co-develop assets that might otherwise fail, and accelerating the delivery of vital therapies to patients in need.
