A $2.3-million grant has been awarded to a University of Toronto researcher involved in a partnership with Cyclica and Rosetta Therapeutics to develop drugs for Parkinson's disease.
The three-year grant from Genome Canada is to support drug discovery related to treating people with the long-term neurodegenerative disease and will involve the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The grant's recipients are G. Angus McQuibban, an associate professor in U of T's department of biochemistry and chief scientific officer of Rosetta Therapeutics, and Cyclica, a biotechnology company in Toronto that uses artificial intelligence.
Peter Lewis, a professor emeritus of biochemistry in the Faculty of Medicine, is chief executive officer of Rosetta Therapeutics, and Naheed Kurji, a Rotman School of Management MBA graduate, is president and chief executive officer of Cyclica.
In the initiative, McQuibban's lab will spearhead the research, Rosetta will drive drug development and Cyclica will be the in silico technological lead, says Lewis.
"This is an unusual endeavour in our project because it combines in silico, in vitro and in vivo methods. The general concept is to accelerate the drug discovery process taking advantage of all these advances in deep learning and machine learning, which has come to the fore in the last few years," says Lewis.
In April 2017, a partnership was announced between Lewis and the McQuibban lab at U of T and Cyclica, which specializes in using artificial intelligence and computational biophysics in the drug discovery process.
