Allcyte’s Pharmascopy platform interrogates drug action in primary human tissues with automated high content microscopy and AI-powered single-cell image analysis.

Exscientia, which uses AI to design and create drug candidate molecules satisfying complex therapeutic requirements with revolutionary efficiency, has acquired Allcyte, the Austrian company that uses AI for cancer screening. Exscientia will pay 50 million euros ($60.6 million) in a combination of cash and shares for the acquisition. (Fortune)

Last month Exscientia announced that its joint research with Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma Co., Ltd. (TYO: 4506) had resulted in the creation of the molecule DSP-0038, a dual-targeted 5-HT1A agonist and 5-HT2A antagonist to be assessed for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease psychosis.

Sumitomo will now initiate a Phase 1 clinical study of DSP-0038 in the United States.

The rationale for acquiring Allcyte

Allcyte’s Pharmascopy is the first-ever functional precision oncology platform that has demonstrated the ability to prioritize highly effective drugs in a prospective clinical study.

Pharmascopy scans the efficacy of a wide range of drugs on live tumor samples taken from a patient. It does this using high-speed, robotic laboratory equipment and then applies computer vision to analyze how the patient’s cells are responding to each drug.

The procedure results in identifying the potentially most effective drug treatment for the patient’s cancer affliction. Allcyte is therefore said to be a pioneer in personalized medicine AI.

Exscientia and Allcyte previously collaborated on a study to assess the performance of an anti-cancer immunotherapy drug Exscentia is developing in collaboration with German pharmaceutical company Evotec.

Vision of patient-first AI

“Allcyte is able to demonstrate what therapy actually works in the individual patient with the most disease-relevant screening platform we have seen.”, said Andrew Hopkins, Exscientia’s CEO.  “Combining Allcyte’s platform with Exscientia’s technologies can redefine how drugs are developed, enabling integrated discovery and patient selection. Allcyte has assembled an outstanding team in Vienna and the integration of the two platforms truly allows us to build our vision of patient-first AI.”

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