The startup fighting cancer with AI

In November 2013, more than 100 patients with cancer – including pancreatic, breast, liver and brain tumours – embarked on clinical trials involving BPM 31510, a drug discovered by an algorithm.

The story of BPM 31510 begins with the extraction of biological data from healthy and cancerous tissue samples from over 1,000 patients. This data was then processed by artificial intelligence algorithms, which analysed it and suggested possible drug treatments. “We’ve essentially reversed the scientific method,” says Niven R Narain, the 38-year-old president and co-founder of Berg, the Boston pharma startup which makes BPM 31510. “Instead of a preconceived hypothesis that leads us to do experiments and generate a particular type of data, we allowed the biological data from the patients to lead us to the hypotheses.”

The current trial has more than 100 participants from Cornell Weill Medical Center in New York, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Although it’s still in its initial phase, the early results are encouraging, indicating that the drug is effective in treating highly metabolic solid tumours in very sick patients with minimal side effects. “We’re seeing the decrease of tumour sizes and we’re seeing patients feeling energetic and doing much better,” says Narain. “And we’re even seeing tumours disappear in first phase of the trial, which is 
rare for this type of patient.”

More here: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/ai-cancer-drugs-berg-pharma-startup

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