MagicMed Develops PsyAI™, the First Pharmaceutical AI Program for Psychedelics

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

On March 4, 2021, MagicMed Industries Inc. announced its collaboration with partners Dr. Suran Goonatilake and Dr. Eric Nyberg to work on the development of the PsyAI™: an artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to provide comprehensive, pharmaceutical design, manufacturing, pharmacology predictive and validating methodologies.

Finding the Key

Current pharmaceutical screening processes are challenging, costly and time consuming. This is especially true in the psychedelics industry due to a limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying observed clinical data. PsyAI™ is a tool designed to potentially streamline this process and further improve future iterations of target molecules to treat an array of brain and mental health indications.  

MagicMed has high hopes that use of its PsyAI™ will drastically speed up the research and development timeline, as well as potentially the preclinical phase of the drug development process. One of the main goals of the PsyAI™ platform is to provide actionable insights that can improve the speed and accuracy of its derivative compound development process.  Included in that process are factors such as efficacy, safety and potential side effects. 

In this industry, data is being generated at a rapid pace. MagicMed is designing its platform to continuously incorporate structured and unstructured data to use those factors to improve the efficiency of its process. The company's PsyAI™  could push the use of modern psychedelics forward by generating robust and specific information to find the most precise molecule tailored to each client's needs.

MagicMed has already built, and continues to add to, an extensive library of psychedelic derivatives called the Psybrary™. Together, PsyAI™ and Psybrary™ are predicted to create opportunities to accelerate the development of optimized pharmaceutical candidates for difficult-to-treat mental health indications. Moving forward, all molecules created by the company will go through the PsyAI™ program, adding to the already available data in the company's Psybrary™.

How Does PsyAI™ Work?

As AI and machine learning grow exponentially, let's break down what PsyAI™ does exactly. This particular system — arranged as a suite of modules — finds patterns in data and continually learns new patterns from new inputs. This is akin to human scientists learning intuitive patterns of "drug-likeness" or patterns of toxicity by observing relationships among molecule-structures and the results of thousands of experiments using these compounds.

"As our tool investigates molecules in the Psybrary™, we aim to predict the binding affinity for a given drug candidate to a variety of target receptors along with additional pharmacokinetic metrics, thus reducing manual testing for all of the compounds.  Additionally, the tool is designed to eliminate or de-prioritize molecules exhibiting toxic features, based on certain 3D structures or chemical properties. This allows us to filter out unusable compounds," Dr. Tucker explained. 

With regard to how the AI system is expected to evolve, Dr. Tucker said,  "As our tool gathers and assesses more data from bench studies, nonclinical studies and even clinical trials, it will be able to more intelligently infer the specific uses and effects associated with a given structure and eventually allow users to specify their desired pharmacologic characteristics, such as usage/effect preferences, and generate recommended molecules as output."

Meet the PsyAI™ Partners

Dr. Goonatilake and Dr. Richard Dallaway are co-founders of April 19 Discovery Inc.: an AI-driven drug-discovery company entirely focused on developing and screening novel compounds for psychedelic medicine. Their research has, in particular, focused on deep-learning, evolutionary systems and hybrid systems that combine many machine-learning methods to find patterns in large data sets.

Dr. Eric Nyberg is the co-founder and chief data scientist at Cognistx, a company creating multistrategy AI-powered computer systems that can sense, learn and act. He is also a world-renowned AI expert and professor, and director of the Computational Data Science program at Carnegie Mellon. He served as a member of the original IBM Watson development team and developed a scalable architecture for multistrategy, question-answering systems.

Dr. Goonatilake and Dr. Nyberg both celebrated thought leaders in AI, expressed their excitement about the PsyAI™ partnership. 

"2021 is an exciting point in history. Three major disciplines are converging: AI-driven drug discovery, synthetic biology and the psychedelic renaissance to treat mental health conditions. It's very exciting to be at the nexus of this convergence," Dr. Goonatilake commented. 

"AI will increase the value of each compound that MagicMed has synthesized as a potential therapeutic. Because AI systems can replace human scientists, at least in the initial stages of screening, it can reduce the time and cost to bring a therapeutic to market."

Nyberg added, "I believe that the need for and value of developing this new tool to revolutionize the psychedelic medicine sector cannot be overstated."

MagicMed's mission is to support and enable the commercialization of psychedelic-derived pharmaceuticals for brain and mental health. For more info on MagicMed Inc. visit https://magicmedindustries.com/.

To access the company's full press release, click HERE. 

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.