A case in which an artificial intelligence (AI)-recommended drug candidate entered an actual clinical trial has emerged in Korea.
Hanmi Pharmaceutical(128940) said on the 24th that at the recent Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Washington, D.C., it presented results from its in-house AI platform, HARP-pSAR. ISMB is a leading international conference in bioinformatics and AI-driven drug development.
HARP-pSAR predicts how efficacy changes when the amino acid sequence of a protein varies slightly to identify the optimal candidate. A Hanmi Pharmaceutical official said, "Instead of researchers making and testing countless candidates one by one, AI first presents the most promising ones," adding, "HARP-pSAR is designed to predict the pharmacological activity of proteins even with limited experimental data."
Hanmi Pharmaceutical used this platform to develop HM17321. This candidate is an obesity treatment aimed at reducing weight while increasing muscle mass, and a phase 1 clinical trial is underway in the United States.
In June, Hanmi Pharmaceutical unveiled another candidate, HM500197, targeting myostatin, a protein that inhibits muscle growth, at the American Diabetes Association (ADA). This candidate was also designed using HARP-pSAR.