Standigm and SK holdings C&C Release an AI-Based Target Identification Platform, iCLUE&ASK™, to Accelerate Drug Discovery Process
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - Sep 29, 2020 - Standigm Inc. (Standigm), an artificial intelligence (AI)-based drug discovery company, and SK holdings C&C, Co., Ltd. (SK holdings C&C), a specialized Information and communications technology company, announced today that they opened their AI-based target identification platform, iCLUE&ASK, on a trial basis to the public. The platform offers to prioritize protein targets for a query disease and provide the results with evidence through an interactive user interface.
iCLUE&ASK combines Standigm ASK, an AI-driven target prediction technology, with their joint invention, iCAN(iCLUE&ASK-NLP), a natural language processing technology on top of SK holdings C&Cs iCLUE, a platform for AI-based pharmaceutical research. It is the first successful result of their collaboration after the $8M strategic investment of SK holdings, Co., Ltd. to Standigm last November 2019.
iCLUE&ASK (https://icluenask.standigm.com) is free and open to anyone with a simple registration until the end of 2020. Its semantic query engine and command-free database browser construct a user-friendly interface. Users are also provided with a customized database where researchers can integrate their own data and prioritize targets for query diseases.
Thanks to SK holdings C&Cs advanced AI & platform technology, Standigms target discovery AI is able to communicate with researchers and developers in the research ecosystem. Through this release, we are expecting to develop a better target prediction platform together with researchers all over the world, said So Jeong Yun, Co-founder and Chief Research Officer of Standigm. We look forward to multifarious feedbacks from users in the pharmaceutical industry, hospitals, and academic institutions.
This partnership with Standigm creates a lot of synergy between AI technology of two companies, said Dong-June Yoon, SK holdings C&Cs leader of Healthcare Biz. group. iCLUE&ASK will ease the burden of collecting information from thousands of literature and various databases in the biomedical field, and we believe that our collaboration opens an opportunity to uncover new therapeutic targets rapidly.
About iCLUE&ASK
iCLUE&ASK is an AI-aided disease-target identification platform that prioritizes protein targets for diseases and provides the results as a graph of the important paths in the queried disease-target relations. Standigm ASK, the prototyping technology of iCLUE&ASK, was presented in RECOMB 2020 and the Milner Therapeutics symposium 2020.
iCLUE&ASK platform consists of three main components: (1) a massively linked, heterogeneous knowledge graph as database, (2) an attention mechanism-aided deep neural network as target prioritization algorithm, and (3) command-free, user-driven exploration as an interactive user interface.
The iCLUE&ASK database is maintained by iCAN(iCLUE&ASK-NLP), a natural language processing technology that Standigm and SK holdings C&C have jointly invented. iCAN extracts the latest updates regarding the gene-disease association from unstructured textual data such as abstracts of scientific publications. Learn more at https://icluenask.standigm.com
About Standigm
Standigm Inc. is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company. Applying its own innovative AI to the real world, Standigm currently has more than 20 preclinical pipelines across various therapeutic areas. Pursuing a full-stack, AI-driven industrializing drug discovery, Standigm has achieved the automation of molecular design workflow through DarkMolFactory, and the automation effort has been expanding to the whole drug discovery process on the basis of Standigm AI platforms, including Standigm ASK for target discovery, Standigm BEST for lead selection, and Standigm Insight for drug repurposing.
Founded in 2015, Standigm has raised $23M from leading investors and developed an elite team with multi-disciplinary expertise in chemistry, biology, pharmacology, artificial intelligence, and data structures to ease the pains of patients all over the world. Learn more at https://www.standigm.com
About SK holdings C&C
SK holdings C&C has been building IT expertise and strong brand awareness with extensive track record in executing IT and ITS projects across all business areas including telecommunications, finance, manufacturing and services. Since SK holdings C&C announced transfiguration into a leading company in digital transformation in 2016, the Company has been leveraging core digital technologies such as AI, cloud, and big data to pioneer digitally innovative markets in all sectors including telecommunications, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare and finance. The Company is cementing its position as a leading company in digital transformation, driving technological innovation in industries and identifying new digital service markets for customers. Learn more at http://www.skcc.com