Relation Therapeutics announces launch of flagship integrated wet–dry laboratory at the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter
Edith Hessel, experienced R&D and biopharma executive, named as Chief Scientific Officer
Osteoporosis announced as first indication, driven by Relation’s proprietary engine for indication selection SelectomaticTM
February 22, 2023 01:00 AM Eastern Standard Time
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Relation Therapeutics, a leader in the use of high-resolution biology, machine learning and clinical insights to discover life-changing medicines, announced today the opening of their flagship integrated wet–dry laboratory. The laboratory and offices comprise 5,500 sq ft, located at the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter, in close reach of collaborators and partners including globally renowned academic research centres and major pharma companies. Over the last year the company has grown to a 35-strong cross-disciplinary seed-stage company. The new space is another step forward in realising Relation’s ambition to establish a novel transformational approach to drug discovery.
The integrated wet–dry laboratory’s unique value for drug discovery comes from efficiently combining the most sophisticated functional genomic techniques with extraordinary computational power and machine learning. With the acquisition of genomic data from human cells, Relation obtains direct insights into critical biological relationships, which are then fed directly into the dry laboratory’s machine learning engine. The engine then automatically requests new experiments to improve its predictive ability, cutting through an otherwise undecipherable combinatorial space. This sequence of experiments is the essence of Relation’s Lab-in-the-Loop and by uniting these two technologies Relation aims to radically improve the probability of success of drug discovery and development.
“Deploying machine learning to understand such a vast array of interactions between genes, proteins and drugs holds extraordinary potential for discovering new drugs,” said Sir Paul Nurse, CEO of the Francis Crick Institute who alongside the executive team led the official opening. “It is pleasing to see Relation Therapeutics joining the Crick and other innovative bioscience enterprises in the Knowledge Quarter, further enhancing London’s already internationally distinguished bio ecosystem.”
Relation Therapeutics further announced the appointment of Dr. Edith M. Hessel, a former GSK R&D executive, as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO). Dr. Hessel will lead the drug discovery direction of the company and the progression of its pipeline to the clinic. Dr. Hessel has successfully pioneered the development of novel target discovery platforms, advanced therapeutics from inception to clinical proof of concept, and has extensive experience in founding biotech companies. As a VP at GSK, Dr. Hessel built the Refractory Respiratory Inflammation Discovery Performance Unit, which added multiple novel targets to GSK’s pipeline.
“I am absolutely delighted to be part of Relation’s mission to transform drug discovery, probing unexplored molecular target spaces for potentially life-changing medicines,” said Edith Hessel. “Relation combines a world-class team with cutting-edge technology, including access to NVIDIA’s Cambridge-1, the UK’s most powerful super-computer. Utilising first-class computational capacity to explore experimental data, clinical insights and high-resolution biology will transform drug discovery as we know it, allowing us to develop better medicines for patients.”
In addition, Relation shared their vision for indication selection, which uses a proprietary machine learning engine - SelectomaticTM - to recommend those indications where Relation’s integrated platform enables the development of transformational therapeutics. Application of this engine led to the initiation of osteoporosis as the first disease that Relation will pursue. Osteoporosis, a metabolic bone disease, is characterised by low bone density and deterioration of bone architecture, increasing the risk of fractures.1 It is estimated that there are approximately ten million people with osteoporosis in the USA alone,1 with nearly one million considered to be patients at high risk of fractures. Furthermore, in Europe, 32 million people over 50 are estimated to have osteoporosis.2 Current treatment options have a number of limitations, including safety concerns, low uptake, and limited duration of efficacy.
“The use of single-cell profiling allows our scientists to understand bone biology with exquisite detail and provides us with the unique opportunity to be at the forefront of finding a next-generation therapy for osteoporosis,” said Dr. David Roblin, Chief Executive Officer. “This access to rich single-cell data perfectly enables the power of our machine learning engine in a disease of significant unmet need.”
In their mission to discover life-changing medicines, the team at Relation Therapeutics leverages their extensive experience in building successful biotechnology businesses. This includes Dr. Charlie Roberts, the Chairperson of Relation, who is the co-founder of Freenome, a San Francisco-based company that has raised over $1bn from investors including Roche and Novartis. In June 2022, DCVC and Magnetic Ventures co-led a $25-million round of seed financing, with participation from Khosla Ventures, OMERS Ventures, and Firstminute Capital, among others.
To learn more about Relation Therapeutics, please visit: https://www.relationrx.com/.
About Relation
Relation is a biotechnology company focused on leveraging computational and experimental techniques to understand biology better. Central to Relation’s approach is its integrated wet–dry laboratory which leverages human genetics, single-cell profiling and machine learning to generate new insights with real translational validity. The company is located in London.
References
Wright N, Looker A, Saag K, et al. The recent prevalence of osteoporosis and low bone mass in the United States based on bone mineral density at the femoral neck or lumbar spine. J Bone Miner Res. 2014;29(11):2520–2526.
Kanis JA, et al., SCOPE 2021: a New Scorecard for Osteoporosis in Europe, Arch Osteoporos, 2021, 16(1):82.
Contacts
For further queries, please contact:
Dr. Rosie Rodriguez – SVP, Growth, Relation Therapeutics: rosie@relationrx.com; +44 7511 183023
Relation Therapeutics, the Active-Graph Machine Learning Drug Discovery Company, Names David Roblin as CEO and Lindsay Edwards as CTO
DCVC and Magnetic Ventures co-led a $25 million seed financing, with participation from Khosla Ventures, OMERS Ventures, and firstminute Capital, among others
June 09, 2022 08:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Relation Therapeutics, the pioneer of drug discovery using active-graph machine learning (ML) combined with single-cell analysis and deep clinical insights, announced today that it had raised a $25 million investment and hired a Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer. The funding and expanded leadership will enable Relation to scale its platform and advance therapeutic candidates for diseases with no or few good medicines.
“Relation brings a powerful, proven approach to interrogating extremely complex information to efficiently make high-quality recommendations. The speed at which they operate and the progress they’ve made are remarkable and may be transformative. We’re thrilled to join them in their efforts”
Dr. David Roblin joins the company as Chief Executive Officer and Dr. Lindsay Edwards as Chief Technology Officer and President of Platform. “We will dramatically improve success in drug discovery—we must, because patients are waiting for breakthrough medicines,” said Roblin. “Our approach brings together, for the first time, human genetics, single-cell omics, functional genomics, and active-graph machine learning in a single, engineered design. We believe our techniques will significantly accelerate the discovery of new, life-changing drugs.”
The critical bottleneck in drug discovery remains the poor understanding of the biology underlying disease. As a result, we don’t know why patients become sick; and far too often most drug candidates fail in trials and many devastating diseases remain untreated. Historically, successful drugs have mostly been discovered by sheer luck. Relation delivers a radically different approach that can better understand the biology of disease and rationally discover new therapeutics.
Relation’s platform uses the power of active-graph ML, called Metagraph. The technology has been successfully employed by technology companies to solve problems in computer vision and product recommendations, but never before in drug discovery at this scale. With active-graph machine learning, Relation can understand the huge number of combinatorial functional relationships between genes, proteins, and drugs. Relation will be piloting part of this work with NVIDIA, as one of only four startups to have access to the NVIDIA Cambridge-1 GPU supercomputer.
Relation’s pioneering “lab-in-the-loop” integrates active learning at every step of drug discovery, from predicting cell states to the validation of new targets. An important challenge for any therapeutics company using machine learning is “ground-truth data,” or information known to be true. Working from real cells provided by proprietary biobanks, Relation’s technology generates genomic data that provide direct insights into critical biological relationships that are fed directly into its ML systems. The platform then automatically requests new experiments to improve its predictive ability, cutting through an otherwise intractable combinatorial space.
Relation is focusing initially on bone diseases, where there is a pressing unmet medical need, and because the company’s platform has a clear advantage where there exist good cellular representations. “Relation brings a powerful, proven approach to interrogating extremely complex information to efficiently make high-quality recommendations. The speed at which they operate and the progress they’ve made are remarkable and may be transformative. We’re thrilled to join them in their efforts,” said Jason Pontin, a DCVC Partner and Relation board member.
Christine Aylward, Founder & Managing Partner of Magnetic Ventures and a member of Relation’s board, commented, “Beyond its groundbreaking platform technology, Relation’s team has demonstrated its ability to form partnerships and attract an interdisciplinary set of global leaders across machine learning, single-cell genomics, and drug discovery. We are delighted to partner with Relation and the investor syndicate to support the company’s vision of transforming drug discovery with its novel approach.”
Dr. David Roblin is a distinguished scientist, physician, entrepreneur, and life-sciences industry executive. Roblin has been involved in Relation since its founding, while engaged as CEO of Juvenescence Therapeutics, an early investor in Relation. Before joining Relation, he was Chair of Scientific Translation at the Francis Crick Institute, where during his eight-year tenure, he held several executive positions. Earlier, Dr. Roblin was SVP and Head of European R&D for Pfizer. He is also a Non-Executive Director of Sosei Heptares (SOLTF) and Non-Executive Chair of Centauri Therapeutics.
Dr. Lindsay Edwards was previously Vice President and Head of Artificial Intelligence for Respiratory and Immunology at AstraZeneca, where he built a world class machine learning function. Earlier, he founded and led one of GSK’s first data science groups and served as Vice President and Head of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning for the UK and Europe.
Relation’s scientific advisory board includes luminaries from a broad range of disciplines, including Professor Michael Bronstein, DeepMind Professor of AI at Oxford University and Head of Graph AI at Twitter; Professor Caroline Uhler, core institute member and co-director of the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute and Associate Professor at MIT; and Professor Alex K. Shalek, institute member at the Broad Institute and Associate Professor at MIT. Relation has a history of collaboration and co-publishing with Turing Award Winner Professor Yoshua Bengio of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila) on the application of the active learning algorithms.
In addition to DCVC and Magnetic Ventures, the seed financing also included participation from Khosla Ventures, OMERS Ventures, and firstminute Capital, Peer Schatz, the former CEO of Qiagen (NYSE:QGEN), Jonathan Milner, founder of Abcam (LSE:ABC), and Mark Stevenson, former COO of ThermoFisher (NYSE:TMO).
About Relation
Relation discovers new biology to cure disease faster, transforming the traditional R&D model: because patients are waiting. Integral to this, Relation combines the power of active-graph machine learning and large-scale, high-quality data that describes disease biology to find better ways of targeting human pathology. We generate proprietary maps of disease in humans, leveraging human genetics, single-cell omics and perturbational data, so that these powerful models can be deployed at last. Relation’s platform sits in an integrated wet-lab, dry-lab, translational science loop, located in London.
Endpoints Exclusive: Pfizer vet grabs $25M seed round to 'integrate' machine learning, genomics tech in drug R&D
Amber Tong Senior Editor
9 June 2022
Having been involved in a number of attrition task force efforts during his tenure as European R&D chief at Pfizer, David Roblin tells me there’s a quote that resonates with him, uttered 20 years ago by South African biologist Sydney Brenner when he accepted a Nobel Prize.
“We are drowning in a sea of data but thirsty for knowledge,” is how Roblin remembers it.
But the way those data have been used to date — by drug discovery scientists trying to validate their ideas — hasn’t really improved the rate at which preclinical compounds become marketed drugs, he reckons. The potential he sees for machine learning and new technologies like single-cell transcriptomics to change that is the reason why, after eight years as chief of scientific translation at London’s Francis Crick Institute, he’s moving down the road to Relation Therapeutics, which has just closed a $25 million seed round.
“We’re not going to sit here and tell you that machine learning is the single answer and everything will be designed in the machine and that machine will send a file to the FDA,” he said. “The key question for a company like ours is, where do you best deploy machine learning that affords maximum impact? Where do you use transcriptomics? And where do you see the linkage?”
Roblin, the CEO, is joined in the C-suite by Lindsay Edwards, CTO and president of platform. The former head of AI for respiratory and immunology at AstraZeneca, Edward also led one of GSK’s first data science groups before that.
Coming out of stealth at a time the idea of deploying AI/ML in drug R&D has already gone through a couple cycles of hype and bust, Relation’s approach will be grounded in active learning, where machine learning systems will go through the data generated in its wet and in silico labs, and then tell the scientists what new experiments to run for it to come up with new insight.
Specifically, Edwards noted, the company will be using a framework called active-graph machine learning, or Metagraph, using the concept of graphs as a backbone so as to map out the complex relationships between genes, proteins and drugs.
“What Lindsay is doing, largely, is taking algorithms, ideas that have been deployed elsewhere, particularly in consumer social networking, and turning them to the purpose of gene variant biology, identification,” Roblin said, adding:. “So in that sense, I’m quite happy to say like, a lot of that stuff is not absolutely breakthrough. What we’re going to be doing is creating a platform of integration which is second to none, essentially.”
Based in the Knowledge Quarter in London — surrounded by UCL, King’s and Francis Crick as well as several hospitals — Relation is looking to crunch genomic data on the individual cell level with samples provided by neighboring biobanks.
As its first big project, the team is developing a cell atlas of the bone, an area where significant gaps in biological understanding still exist, according to Roblin. It is important, in his words, to fully grasp the translational route and ensure the cell models used in Relation’s labs are “as close to recapitulation of disease as possible.”
“Making sure you work on the right things is a really critical problem,” Edwards said.
Relation will also get help from NVIDIA, which is giving it access to the NVIDIA Cambridge-1 GPU supercomputer, which helps opens up new possibilities for looking at large stretches of DNA.
“Everybody runs into a compute limitation, and that basically sets the width of the amount of DNA that you can look at in a single go,” he said. “So access to Cambridge lab, we expect will give us some kind of breakthrough receptive fields with our models.”
With “really good R&D people” at the center of it all, Roblin said Relation will aim to grow from 15 to 40 staffers with the new cash. The company has also put together a hefty scientific advisory board, including Michael Bronstein (Oxford professor and head of graph AI at Twitter), as well as Alex Shalek and Caroline Uhler of the Broad Institute.
DCVC and Magnetic Ventures co-led the financing, with participation from Khosla Ventures, OMERS Ventures, and firstminute Capital, plus a number of individual investors.
First Wave of Startups Harnesses UK’s Most Powerful Supercomputer to Power Digital Biology Breakthroughs
March 22, 2022
Four UK-based NVIDIA Inception members to access Cambridge-1 system to advance healthcare research using AI and simulation.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/03/22/startups-harness-cambridge-1-supercomputer/
Four NVIDIA Inception members have been selected as the first cohort of startups to access Cambridge-1, the U.K.’s most powerful supercomputer.
The system will help British companies Alchemab Therapeutics, InstaDeep, Peptone and Relation Therapeutics enable breakthroughs in digital biology.
Officially launched in July, Cambridge-1 — an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD cluster powered by NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, BlueField-2 DPUs and NVIDIA InfiniBand networking — brings together NVIDIA’s decades-long work in accelerated computing, AI and life sciences. Located between London and Cambridge, it ranks among the world’s top 50 fastest computers and is powered by 100 percent renewable energy.
The supercomputer’s five founding partners have already been using it to advance healthcare, using AI to research brain diseases like dementia, design new drugs and more.
Now, the four startups are preparing to use Cambridge-1 to accelerate drug discovery, genome sequencing and disease research.
Each is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a free program that nurtures startups revolutionizing industries with cutting-edge technology. Inception gives members a custom set of ongoing benefits, such as NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute credits, marketing support and technology assistance from experts.
Relation Therapeutics: Mapping the Causes of Disease
Another startup, Relation Therapeutics, combines single-cell profiling, human genetics, functional genomics and machine learning to better understand human biology.
RelationTx uses graph-based recommender system technologies to reveal causal relationships in diseases. RelationTx’s platform can identify the areas of biology to focus on for drug discovery and accelerate research efforts for diseases that have not yet been widely studied.
The company aims to transform how drug discovery and development is conducted, leading to new treatments for disease, according to Lindsay Edwards, chief technology officer at RelationTx.
“Ultimately, our mission is to get new medicines to patients who need them, faster and more efficiently than the current paradigm,” Edwards said. “Access to Cambridge-1 opens up areas of biology that were almost impossible to understand before, such as how genetic variation affects gene expression in inaccessible complex tissues and organ systems.”
Learn More About AI in Healthcare
Groundbreaking work in digital biology is to come from these startups — and Cambridge-1’s founding companies are already harnessing its power.
Using the supercomputer, AstraZeneca and NVIDIA developed the latest iteration of MegaMolBART, a natural language processing model that reads the text format of chemical compounds and uses AI to generate new molecules. The transformer chemistry model is capable of training chemical language models with over 1 billion parameters using the NVIDIA NeMo Megatron framework.
Learn more about AI-based innovation at GTC, where Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA, will discuss how researchers, developers and medical device makers use the NVIDIA Claraplatform to create breakthroughs in healthcare and drug discovery.
Relation Therapeutics teams up with Mila in coalition to identify COVID-19 therapeutic candidates
Relation receives $1.3M grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
London, UK, 1st September 2020: Relation Therapeutics, a drug development company driven by data science and machine learning (ML), today announces Project RE, which will apply Relation Therapeutics’ and its partners’ technology to the identification of repurposed drug combinations as potential therapeutic candidates for COVID-19. Project RE will focus on finding therapies to tackle viral entry and replication and is co-led between Mila (Quebec AI Institute) and Relation Therapeutics, with the overall scientific direction by Mila founder Professor Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award winner 2018). The project will also create a platform to develop therapies that appropriately modulate the immune response through distinct stages of infection with oversight from Relation’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr David Roblin. Funding for Project RE is provided by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Relation Therapeutics.
Relation Therapeutics and Mila will aim to leverage the most powerful machine learning techniques currently being deployed in the world’s largest tech companies and academia, to revolutionise computational drug development. In order to coalesce thought leadership in the space, Relation has strengthened its senior leadership team and SAB with five key appointments: Dr Charles Campbell Roberts, serial entrepreneur, has been appointed Chairperson; Dr David Roblin, COO Juvenescence and former Head of R&D for Pfizer Europe, has been appointed Chief Medical Officer: Professors Michael Bronstein, from Imperial and Twitter, and Will Hamilton and Jian Tang, both from Mila, have been appointed to the SAB.
Dr Charles Campbell Roberts, Relation Therapeutics’ Chairperson, said: “Relation is honoured to work with the Gates Foundation in seeking to rapidly identify COVID-19 therapeutic candidates. Graph ML is at the cutting edge of machine learning, underlying core recommender technologies at tech giants such as Pinterest and is a key research topic at DeepMind. Relation is amongst the first to deploy these approaches directly in drug development, and has been deeply fortunate in attracting so many of the leading scientists in the space to this mission.”
Professor Yoshua Bengio, Mila founder, said: “Using advances in machine learning we can integrate many sources of information about a disease, and build systems that improve over time using active learning. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has identified this approach as a perfect opportunity to use ML to correctly identify and evaluate potential drug combinations as therapeutic approaches for COVID-19, by searching colossal combinatorial space as fast as possible.”
Dr David Roblin, CMO, Relation Therapeutics, said: “Our race together is to beat COVID-19 and improve patient outcomes by identifying existing therapeutics that can be repurposed. To do this we have assembled an outstanding team with Mila and Relation data science, machine learning, biology and drug development expertise. This is essential funding to enable these efforts.”