Snoop Dogg-Backed Cannabis Biotech Joins Forces With Former Google Experts To Boost AI Drug Discovery

London-headquartered Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies confirmed Tuesday the successful completion of proof of concept of its AI-enabled drug discovery asset, which it is developing in collaboration with New York-based tech consultancy, Hypatia AI. The Snoop Dogg-backed cannabis biotech launched in 2017 and has been collaborating with Oxford University, mainly focusing on the development of pain-relieving, cannabinoid-based medications.

Hypatia is designing an AI tool to speed up OCT's drug discovery process. The tool gathers insights from extensive scientific literature, allowing OCT's team more time for research analysis. This focused approach helps researchers find connections and insights that might otherwise be overlooked. By amplifying OCT's expertise, the tool enables the team to explore groundbreaking possibilities for developing non-addictive, cannabinoid-based pain medications, reducing opioid reliance faster than ever before.

“I am very pleased to announce the successful development of this innovative asset that will fuel OCT's future work and journey," stated Clarissa Sowemimo-Coker, chief executive officer of OCT. "We’ve been working closely with David Gordon‘s team at Hypatia for many months on what we believe to be a game-changer in our early-stage drug discovery work. We have a significant library of patent-protected NCEs, and this asset gives us the ability to interrogate that library much more quickly and efficiently than we could previously have done, helping us to generate discoveries more quickly and, in turn, bring into scope more early-stage out-licensing opportunities.”

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Analysis Of 30,000 Scientific Papers

Focusing on OCT’s proprietary and patent-protected library of over 500 modified cannabinoid derivatives, which are classed as new chemical entities (NCEs), the asset augments the literature search and review capabilities of the company's scientific team, taking advantage of large language models to build knowledge graphs and highlight connections across a vast and complex literature at unparalleled speed and scale.

Developed in exclusive collaboration with Hypatia, led by former Google GOOG engineer David Gordon, the asset leverages AI language understanding to enhance and scale OCT's scientists’ literature-based research capabilities. This collaboration aims to streamline and expedite the company's ability to identify potential drug candidates by enabling comprehensive analysis of more than 30,000 scientific papers against its proprietary data.

Gordon, the founder of Hypatia AI, said, “OCT has proven to be the perfect partner for developing our vision of a bespoke ‘AI librarian’. While a lot of AI solutions seek to replace human labor, our vision is to take human insight and creativity and add leverage by providing exponentially better information retrieval than the previous generation of web-scale search was able to provide. The team at OCT naturally understood this hypothesis, having a complementary goal of enabling their talented researchers to unlock maximum value from their information assets. We’re excited for our ongoing partnership as we bring the system to production.”

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