Pointing The Way Towards The Future Of Drug Development

Can AI and automation shorten the time it takes to develop new drugs? Ola Spjuth combines his academic expertise in data-driven drug development with entrepreneurship to help the pharmaceutical industry capitalise on the potential of new technologies.

A stone’s throw from the Uppsala Biomedical Centre, where he leads a research group in pharmaceutical bioinformatics, Ola Spjuth is now building a company that aims to contribute to faster and safer drug development. The innovation that underpins Phenaros Pharmaceuticals is a direct result of the visionary work that has been carried out in Ola Spjuth’s lab over the past several years.

“When I established myself as an independent researcher, I was given the opportunity to build a lab at the department to try to automate experiments using robots and artificial intelligence. When we started, this was very new in academic research in life sciences. Today, we are well established in terms of research as a group that is the forefront of method development,” says Ola Spjuth.

He founded Phenaros together with fellow researcher Jordi Carreras Puigvert, who was recruited to Ola Spjuth’s academic team early on to head up the building of the lab.

“Our work became an embryo for eventually doing something commercial, but it took a few years of research before we were ready to take the plunge,” says Ola Spjuth.

Meeting needs with technological innovation
Phenaros is developing an AI-driven platform that combines phenomics, advanced image analysis and automation to streamline drug development. The company already has paying customers and the market is open. The challenge for the pharmaceutical industry is that the vast majority of clinical trials fail, resulting in long development times. Time is money, and patent clocks are ticking.

“There is a strong and continuous need to accelerate preclinical research. Drug safety evaluation is a difficult process, and AI-driven solutions help make things happen,” says Ola Spjuth.

Phenaros’ ambition is to be the natural partner of all pharmaceutical companies that want to work on next generation safety evaluation and optimisation.

“We have demonstrated in large studies that our platform increases precision; that we can better determine and evaluate drug candidates and identify problems earlier. We are convinced that we will be able to shorten the time it takes to develop new drugs, and studies are in progress in the projects we are conducting together with our customers,” says Ola Spjuth.

Synergies between research and business
A growing number of customers want to come on board, and the team at Phenaros is working hard to get its own lab in place and fine-tuned in its new premises in Uppsala Science Park. Uppsala Biomedical Centre simply did not have the capacity they needed.

“The projects we are running with customers are really large now and we cannot put our research on the back burner, so taking this step and setting up our own facility outside the University became a must. Soon we will be ready to transition to operational mode,” says Ola Spjuth.

He currently serves as CEO of Phenaros. Although it is a challenge to lead both a company and a research group at the University, it is also a dream come true.

“I've always been driven by solving real problems, and it’s a lot of fun when your methods are then implemented and used. That’s why it's been a bit of a dream for me to have a start-up that works closely with the research group. I think we can get lots of synergies that way and benefit from each other, so my goal is to continue building that close connection,” says Ola Spjuth.