AI Meets Aging: Inside The Longevity Revolution With Insilico Medicine (Part 2)

By Ray Dogum, Chief Editor, Drug Discovery Online

An Interview with Alex (Aleksandrs Zavoronkovs) Zhavoronkov, Ph.D., Longevity and drug discovery researcher, Founder, CEO and CBO at Insilico Medicine

I hope enjoyed Part 1 of Alex’s interview.

In past conversations, Alex has suggested that a 120-year lifespan is an achievable target. For context, Hong Kong currently leads the world with an average life expectancy of 85 years, compared to 80 in the U.S. and 78 in China.

Closing that gap will require a fundamental shift in how we approach health, aging, and discovery innovation. Hopefully, AI will become a partner with us on this humanity-altering endeavor.

The second and final part of the interview below focuses on AI technology adoption, Alex’s experience leading Insilico Medicine for over a decade, and his outlook for the future.

Technology Innovation and Adoption

Ray: What are the main blockers that early stage drug pipelines face when integrating advanced AI tools into their workflow?

Alex: The main blocker is validation. You can generate as many targets or molecules as you like with AI but until you progress an asset into the clinic and hit meaningful milestones, the technology won’t be trusted. That’s why we made it a priority at Insilico to take AI-discovered targets and AI-designed molecules all the way into human trials.

Ray: In 2021, you proposed developing a Longevity Tower ecosystem where biotech professionals can live, work, eat, play, collect personal data, and receive high quality healthcare – all driven by AI. Today, it looks like you’ve settled for building the ecosystem flat in Shanghai. Not a bad compromise and probably a lot more accessible. Having multiple Insilico Medicine sites invested in China, today do you believe the life sciences industry innovation in China is outpacing innovation in the US or other European countries?

Alex: What impresses me most about China is the speed and scale. We built a fully automated robotics lab in Suzhou in record time (now LifeStar2 in Shanghai), we’re running multiple clinical trials in China, and we have partnerships with Chinese pharma. R&D is so risky as you might only win one out of ten times so the ability to roll the dice more often at scale is critical. It’s not just good for China but it’s good for the US and for patients everywhere. More competition means cheaper drugs, more treatment options, and a higher chance of breakthroughs in the toughest chronic diseases.

Ray: How realistic is the expectation of privacy in a world where we all have personal AI’s integrated with CCTV that guide us to be healthier people?

Alex: Privacy in a world of personal AI is going to depend entirely on how we design the systems. Integrating data from wearables, sensors, and even CCTV could create very powerful tools to guide healthier choices. On the other hand, those same tools raise real concerns about ownership and misuse. I don’t think privacy will completely disappear, but it will need to be redefined with governance and technology that balances individual benefit with protection of personal data.

Leading Insilico Medicine

Ray: You have multiple early clinical trials running as a result of Insilico’s suite of AI tools. Out of the many indications in your pipeline, what indications are you most optimistic about treating with your drugs?

Alex: We are excited about all of the assets in our pipeline! IPF’s high unmet need and limited approved therapies make it a patient population we are definitely looking forward to helping. It is a devastating disease that is super progressive and often fatal within just a few years of diagnosis. This makes the need for better treatments especially urgent.

Ray: What has been your biggest challenge being both the CEO and more recently the CBO of the company?

Alex: I believe that to build a truly AI-driven biotech you need to connect the science directly to the business. Balancing both roles is demanding, but it also keeps me very close to significant parts of the company and our business model.

Ray: What has been the most rewarding project/effort?

Alex: Without question, the most rewarding effort has been seeing our TNIK inhibitor molecule show positive signals in a Phase 2a trial for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. IPF is a devastating disease with very limited options, and to take a program from ground zero all the way into patients and then see encouraging clinical data was a historic moment not just for Insilico but for the entire field of AI drug discovery.

Future

Ray: Do you believe the future of medicine depends on curing, preventing, or understanding disease?

Alex: I don’t think it’s one or the other, it’s all three. We need to understand the mechanisms of disease first and use that knowledge to prevent it and develop cures. At Insilico we often start with aging research because it helps us understand the root causes which opens the door to effective treatments.

Ray: If AI rules the future of drug discovery, what role will drug hunters play?

Alex: AI will accelerate discovery but it likely won’t replace drug hunters, it will make them even more powerful. Instead of spending years on trial and error they’ll be able to focus on strategy and asking the right scientific questions. The best drug hunters will use AI as a force multiplier.

Ray: At the recent ARDD event you hosted at the University of Copenhagen, you said, “if you want to leave something with your kids, don’t leave them a lot of money, leave them a lot of data.” The last generation didn’t have the data to share, even if they wanted to. The next generation will have much more robust data to share with their children. What kind of data is most important to share and how do you think this will impact our future society?

Alex: Knowledge about your own biology is invaluable. Imagine if every person could pass down their longitudinal health data with genomics, blood tests, imaging, lifestyle all tracked over decades. That kind of record would give the next generation a roadmap of what risks to watch for and how to stay healthier for longer.

Alex Zhavoronkov Biography

Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in generative artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery and biomarker development. Dr. Zhavoronkov has a combined background in biomedicine and computer technology. He has been recognized by Deep Knowledge Analytics in 2019 as one of the top 100 AI leaders in drug discovery and advanced healthcare globally and has been selected as one of Clarivate's Global Highly Cited Scientists for 2022.

Dr. Zhavoronkov founded Insilico in 2014 and applied AI technologies to analyze a wide range of data types, including anti-aging, disease mechanisms, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. In 2016, he pioneered the application of key technologies in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to drug discovery, discovering novel targets and generating novel molecules with satisfied properties.

Prior to Insilico, Dr. Zhavoronkov worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (GPU company acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroGNeuroinformatics, Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012 he published over 200 peer-reviewed research papers, and 3 books. He serves on the advisory or editorial boards of Trends in Molecular Medicine, Aging Research Reviews, Aging, Frontiers in Genetics, npj Aging and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research, Drug Discovery and AI Forum, the world's largest event on aging in the pharmaceutical industry. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.