Enter Disease Name, AI Identifies 'Disease Target'

Building a Target Information Database with Over 24,000 Entries

[Asia Economy Reporter Jin-gyu Lee] SK Holdings C&C (hereinafter SK C&C) announced on the 28th that it will pilot open the AI drug development target discovery service "iClue & Ask," developed together with Standigm.

iClue & Ask immediately recommends disease-related target candidates through AI algorithms when a research disease is searched. When a target is selected, it provides extensive disease-target knowledge along with the recommendation rationale. Discovering targets such as genes and proteins that cause diseases involves searching and analyzing disease-target-drug related knowledge from numerous literature and various databases (DB). This process of target exploration and discovery, which requires significant time and cost, utilizes AI technology.

The two companies applied SK C&C's pharmaceutical AI platform "iClue" and Standigm's drug target discovery AI platform "Standigm Ask" to this service. iClue & Ask has a database integrating various biological databases and literature information for target prediction, covering over 8,000 diseases, more than 12,000 drugs, and over 24,000 targets. Experts classified and refined the database into 27 types of relationships between disease, drug, and target information to enhance usability.

They also jointly developed and installed the AI natural language processing engine "iCan" to quickly update and analyze recently published research literature information. Through a customization service, researchers can add their own data to build a personalized database and utilize it for target prediction.

iClue & Ask will be available free of charge until the end of this year to researchers from pharmaceutical companies, universities, research institutes, as well as anyone interested in new drug development. Dong-jun Yoon, head of SK C&C Healthcare Group, said, "We will support continuous digital innovation and growth of the domestic new drug development industry through AI."

Meanwhile, SK C&C built the "SK Biopharm Drug Design Platform" applying AI in the new drug candidate substance exploration stage in 2018 and is currently developing an AI drug development service specialized in metabolic diseases with Gachon University Gil Hospital. Standigm, an AI drug development company, developed Standigm Ask based on the biological database it has been building since 2017.