It was early one morning in 1996 when Andrew Hopkins, then a doctoral student of biophysics at Oxford University, received a brain wave as he walked home from a late lab meeting.
He tried to find molecules to fight HIV and to better understand drug resistance.
“I remember coming up with the idea that there had to be a better way to discover drugs, other than the complex and expensive way everyone was tracking,” he says. “Why couldn’t we design an automated approach to drug design that would use all the information in parallel so that even a humble PhD student could make a drug? That idea really stuck with me. I almost remember the exact moment to this day. And that was the birth of the idea that eventually became Exscientia.”
It had to turn out to be a lucrative brainwave. Hopkins founded the company in 2012 as a spin-out from the University of Dundee, where he was then a professor. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which are trained to mimic human creativity, to develop new drugs. This includes using automated computer algorithms to sift through large data sets to design new compounds that can treat disease and help select the right patients for each treatment.
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Age 50
Family Married with a 10-year-old daughter. He met his wife, Iva Hopkins Navratilova, at Pfizer. Her company, Kinetic Discovery, merged with his to create the experimental biology labs at Exscientia.
Education Dwr-y-Felin Comprehensive and Neath College in South Wales; degree in chemistry at Manchester; PhD in Molecular Biophysics at Oxford.
Pay £415,000
Last holiday Czech Republic to visit his wife’s family at Easter.
Best advice he got “My father worked in a factory. He said to me, ‘Get a good education and find a job that you like. It’s worth an extra six grand a year.’ And I definitely got a job that I enjoy doing.”
Biggest career mistake “It’s too early to say.” He quotes Miles Davis: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play next that makes it right or wrong.”
Words he uses too much “Fundamental”; “the heart of the matter”.
How he relaxes Reading and walking the dog. “I am a bibliophile. I immerse myself in books to relax.”
This approach drastically shortens the time of drug development. Hopkins says Exscientia’s pipeline has typically taken 12 to 15 months from project initiation to drug candidate identification, compared to four and a half years in the traditional pharmaceutical industry.
The average cost of developing a drug is $2 billion, according to Deloitte’s latest pharma report, and many drugs fail — the failure rate is 90% for drugs that are in early clinical trials (where they’re tested on humans).
Typically, drug companies make 2,500 compounds to test against a specific disease, while AI allows Oxford-based Exscientia to reduce that number to about 250, Hopkins says. “It’s a much more methodical approach.”
Last fall, the Welsh scientist became one of Britain’s richest entrepreneurs, making a paper fortune of £400 million after the company made a $2.9 billion stock market debut on New York’s Nasdaq, making it one of the largest biotech companies. of Great Britain. Hopkins’ nearly 16% stake is now worth £170m as the share price has lost 60% of its value in a massacre for Wall Street stocks.
Exscientia was part of a transatlantic trend that is defying the government’s attempts to build a biotech powerhouse in the UK. Abcam, a pioneering antibody company based in Cambridge, recently announced that it is moving its listing from the UK to the US. “We are a British company; we choose to be in Oxford because we can attract talent worldwide,” says Hopkins. “But in order to be seen as a global company, we listed on what is the global technology index, which is Nasdaq. What we have now is an incredible international shareholder base from around the world.”
The company came up with the first AI-designed drug to enter clinical trials – a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder in collaboration with Japan’s Sumitomo, although Sumitomo later decided not to go ahead with it. The Japanese company is currently studying another drug developed by Exscientia to treat the psychosis of Alzheimer’s disease in early human trials.
Hopkins, now 50, fell in love with science thanks to an inspiring chemistry teacher. He has been working as a scientist since he was 16, when he did a stint in industrial chemistry at the Port Talbot steel mill in South Wales, which he says taught him about the benefits of automation in increasing productivity.
He spent nearly a decade at US drug giant Pfizer, working on a “data warehouse” project that led to some of the pharmaceutical industry’s first machine learning applications, the findings of which were published in Nature in 2006.
During the next five years at Dundee University, he continued to research the application of data mining and machine learning to drug discovery. He says that “being a professor is actually one of the best jobs in the world” and gave him the freedom to do extensive research on AI methods. He maintains his ties to the university, where he is Honorary President of Medical Informatics at the School of Life Sciences.
Exscientia (meaning ‘of knowledge’ in Latin) soon moved to the Schrödinger Building in Oxford Science Park and now employs 450 people worldwide, from Vienna to Boston, Miami and Osaka, evenly split over AI engineering, chemistry and biology.
It is building a new robotics lab in Milton Park near Oxford, aimed at automating chemistry and biology to accelerate drug development and its stated goal is “drugs designed by AI, made by robot”. Other pharmaceutical companies have also introduced some automation to their processes, but in general lab technology is similar to what it was like when he was a college student in the 1990s, Hopkins says.
The company is involved in 30 projects, some in collaboration with major pharmaceutical companies, including France’s Sanofi and US Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). It is also working with the University of Oxford to develop drugs targeting neuroinflammation for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Among the company’s solo projects, a cancer drug for solid tumors is about to enter early clinical trials.
Exscientia is also working on a broader coronavirus pill to rival Paxlovid, the Covid-19 treatment from Hopkins’ former employer Pfizer. This work is funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which took a stake in Exscientia. The company’s other investors include BMS, Celgene (now a BMS subsidiary) and Germany’s Evotec, as well as Japan’s Softbank, US fund manager BlackRock and life science investor Novo Holdings.
Hopkins says the team has identified a range of molecules that could work as a broader treatment for Covid-19, new mutations and other coronaviruses, with more news to come later this year. The company is committed to a low-cost pill that can be distributed worldwide and given quickly to people who get sick to avoid serious illness and hospitalization. Covid-19 infections are on the rise again in 110 countries and the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has warned that the pandemic is far from over.
Companies in the pharmaceutical industry have started using AI in recent years. AstraZeneca is investing heavily in it for its entire research and development infrastructure, and GSK has built an AI team of 120 engineers, with plans to reach 160 next year, making it the largest such in-house team in the industry.
AI systems require a lot of computing power and huge data sets. Its use should increase the number of new drugs approved each year — typically 40 to 50 in the US — to many more. Hopkins confidently predicts, “This is the way all drugs will be designed in the future. In the next decade, this technology will become ubiquitous.”