This BioPharma Is Using Machine Learning To De-Risk Drug Discovery - Offering Everyday Investors A Chance To Own Equity

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iMetabolic BioPharma (iMBP) has launched a StartEngine campaign to raise capital and give individual investors a chance to help fund the company’s mission to make more effective, more affordable treatments available to the communities that need them. The early-stage drug discovery company is working on cutting-edge treatments for diseases like cardiometabolic, cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s Disease that desperately need better options. 

By leveraging a unique tech-driven drug discovery process that uses machine learning and computational engineering, iMBP aims to cut the cost and time it takes to bring a drug to market so those important therapies can reach people faster and be provided at a fraction of the current new therapeutic cost. The StartEngine campaign is meant to raise additional capital to fund further development of its proprietary technology as well as further developmental research of the drug programs already in progress.  The campaign also provides a mechanism for everyday people to invest in the exclusive world of early-stage biotech and participate in iMBP’s success

The Classical Biopharma Drug Discovery Process Is Slow, Expensive, And Complex

The traditional biopharma discovery process begins with identifying a molecular target that causes a disease. Then, researchers generate a library of protein-based drug candidates (biologics) through complex immunization and phage display campaigns. This generated library is then laboriously screened to find the candidates that act on that target. Once a shortlist is identified, researchers intensively refine, optimize and characterize these molecules to select the best lead for the intended purpose of beginning preclinical and clinical trials to test for safety and efficacy. 

Approximately 90% of drug programs fail to make it to market, meaning they never generate a return on the millions invested in that clinical research. About half of these failures are because the candidate wasn’t able to produce the intended effect and another 30% will fail due to toxicity or side effects.

Meanwhile, the average cost of bringing a single drug to market is about $350 million. But that’s just for the drug that makes it to market – when you factor in failed drug programs, large pharmaceutical companies spend an average of $5 billion per new medicine.

For patients, that means the price tag on their treatments has to cover not just the cost of developing that specific medicine but also make up for the sunk cost of all those failed drug programs. Life-saving therapies now end up costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, per patient. 

In addition to being expensive, the current system can pressure drug developers to push a therapy forward without fully understanding or considering whether its benefits outweigh the potential risks. That doesn’t mean they’re manipulating data, per se, but systematic reviews do show that industry-funded clinical trials, those needed to gain regulatory approval, are more likely to report positive results than publicly-funded post-approval trials. 

This is, in part, because regulatory approval trials are designed to have primary endpoints, and provide patient support for protocol compliance and stringent patient selection criteria so that the drug candidate has the highest probability to show positive results. This is irrespective even if the endpoints and dosing protocols cannot truly demonstrate a reasonable clinical benefit, cost and/or treatment regimen that can benefit the full spectrum of patients who need the treatment.

These industry-funded trials are also more likely to use placebos as their control rather than existing treatments for the disease in question. While there’s nothing wrong with that methodology, that means the drug candidate is effectively only being compared to receiving no treatment at all. But just because it’s better than getting no treatment doesn’t mean it’s better than the current best available treatment. 

iMBP’s Proprietary Technology Revolutionizes The Classic Discovery Process

One reason for the high failure rate of clinical drug programs is that it’s hard to truly control the site of molecular targeting in classical biotechnology approaches. This leaves in question the optimal therapeutic effect or whether the design of this therapeutic candidate is really the best or safest to use. While existing scientific knowledge helps provide a foundation, the actual generation and selection process is really just trial and error, sometimes resulting in significant time delays that could result in a “good enough” selection criteria. By the time researchers realize that a therapeutic candidate is either ineffective or unsafe, the developer may have already sunk millions into preclinical or clinical trials. 

With the iPlatform^™, iMBP is essentially aiming to fail and iterate faster, meaning it can rule out unlikely therapeutics candidates early on in the process before it’s invested significant time, money, and resources into it. This tech-driven biotechnology approach is the next stage of drug discovery evolution and is now becoming generally referred to as “TechBio.”  The approach at iMBP to improve the therapeutic discovery process uses machine learning to analyze molecular interactions allowing  for strategic protein engineering to enhance both potential therapeutic action and safety. This very quickly creates a narrow list of the highest value candidates that are most likely to succeed. 

The patent-pending platform leads to significant savings of both time and money for iMBP, but it provides an innovative approach to design and test therapeutic candidates that could also lead to more effective and more affordable treatments for patients. Instead of drugs that barely meet endpoints, don’t really improve on the existing treatments out there, or do so only alongside a host of harmful side effects, the precision iPlatform^™ provides to the discovery phase enables the company to create therapeutic solutions that are most likely to offer significant clinical benefits. 

Using TechBio, iMBP is pioneering the field as it has already developed five therapeutic programs targeting a range of cardiometabolic and cardiovascular diseases, as well as Diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. These diseases currently affect over 100 million Americans alone. The biopharma also has four more programs in preparation. 

Now, everyday investors have a chance to invest in iMBP’s innovative approach to drug discovery and the lifesaving treatments it’s aiming to deliver to communities. iMBP is raising capital via a StartEngine campaign where investors can join a community of action and directly support this early-stage  innovation and participate in its growth and success. Learn more about the technology and vision as well as the investment terms here. 

Featured Photo provided by iMetabolic Biopharma Corporation

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