Together against aging

The most valuable assets of bioinformatics companies are their employees and, according to Insilico Medicine CEO Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, the company is continuously searching for talent through hackathons (brainstorming sessions), contests and competitions. 

The founder and former CEO of InSilicoScreen, Dr. Quentin Vanhaelen, has single-handedly developed a vertically integrated system that synthesizes data, creates complex simulations using manually verifiable and automatically annotated databases on molecular interactions, mainly in Fortran, and generates impressive reports in LaTeX format. Obviously, the management of Insilico Medicine is a very pretty association.

Since 2013, InSilicoScreen employees working under the guidance of Dr. Vanhelen have formed huge databases of kinetic interactions of proteins and created many complex models of intracellular processes, including signal transmission, regulation of cellular metabolism, autophagy and the cell cycle. The ultimate goal of their work is to create models of human aging and regenerative processes in order to find new and test existing interventions at various levels, ranging from an individual cell to the whole organism. The company has developed a service-oriented business model and cooperates with many academic and commercial groups around the world.

According to Vanhelen, he has been familiar with the activities of Insilico Medicine for more than a year and a half and during this period the company has always been under the close attention of the public due to the innovations it offers. However, Vanhelen realized that the company's employees are very purposeful and with the help of models and simulations developed by him, they can use their real clinical data and algorithms for activating biological mechanisms for a variety of purposes, including deep learning. Vanhelen really liked the joint activity and plans to spend his time between Baltimore, Brussels and Moscow.

Studying aging is a very altruistic endeavor, but creating a stable business model is often a difficult task. As part of its business model, Insilico Medicine provides large pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies, integrated venture investment funds, academic institutions and other organizations with large biological or pharmaceutical databases with services such as contract research, data quality analysis, cross-platform harmonization, activation analysis of signaling mechanisms, biomarker development, verification and evaluation quality of clinical research portfolio, portfolio analysis, as well as services for quality assessment and reprofiling of medicines.

According to Dmitry Kaminsky, senior partner of the Deep Knowledge Ventures investment venture fund, the fund's management is happy that the leading company from their portfolio has expanded the scope of its scientific leadership by merging with another eccentric, but exceptionally bright theorist in the field of systems biology, who managed to create unexpectedly complex models of human biological systems, allowing to obtain dynamic simulations.

Evgeniya Ryabtseva

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on EurekAlert materials!: The first M&A in aging bioinformatics.