It was an early morning in 1996 when Andrew Hopkins, then a doctoral student in biophysics at the University of Oxford, had an idea while walking home from a late-night lab meeting.
He was trying to find molecules to fight HIV and better understand drug resistance.
“I remember being struck by the idea that there must be a better way to discover drugs than the complex and expensive way everyone was following,” he says. “Why couldn’t we design an automated approach to drug design that would use all the information in parallel so that even a humble Ph.D. student could create a drug? That idea really stuck with me. I remember almost the exact moment to this day. And that was the genesis of the idea that eventually became Exscientia.”
It was to demonstrate a lucrative idea. Hopkins founded the company in 2012 as a spin-off from the University of Dundee, where he was then working as a professor. He uses artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which are being trained to mimic human creativity, to develop new drugs. This involves the use of automated computer algorithms to filter large data sets to design
CV
Years fifty
Family Married with a 10 year old daughter. He met his wife, Iva Hopkins Navratilova, at Pfizer. His business, Kinetic Discovery, merged with his to create the experimental biology labs at Exscientia.
Education Dwr-y-Felin Comprehensive and Neath College in South Wales; degree in chemistry in Manchester; PhD in molecular biophysics at Oxford.
Pay £415,000
Last vacations Czech Republic to visit his wife’s family at Easter.
The best advice you’ve ever been given “My dad worked in a factory. He told me, ‘Get a good education and get a job you love to do. It’s worth six thousand more a year. And I definitely got a job that I enjoy doing.”
Biggest career mistake “It’s too soon to say that”. He quotes Miles Davis: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note, it’s the note you play next that makes it right or wrong.”
Words that abuse “Fundamentally”; “the importance of the matter”.
how do you relax Read and walk dogs. “I am a bibliophile. I immerse myself in books to relax.”
new compounds that can treat diseases and help select the right patients for each treatment.
This approach dramatically reduces drug development time. Hopkins says that for the Exscientia pipeline, it has typically taken 12 to 15 months from the start of a project to the identification of a drug candidate, compared to four and a half years in the traditional pharmaceutical industry.
The average cost of developing a drug is $2 billion, according to Deloitte’s latest pharmaceutical report, and many drugs fail: The failure rate is 90% for drugs in early clinical studies (where they are tested on humans).
Pharmaceutical companies typically make 2,500 compounds to test against a specific disease, while AI allows Oxford-based Exscientia to reduce that number to about 250, says Hopkins. “It’s a much more methodical approach.”
Last autumn, the Welsh scientist became one of Britain’s richest businessmen, with a paper fortune of £400m after the company achieved a Stock market debut of 2.9 billion dollars on the Nasdaq in New York, making it one of Britain’s largest biotech companies. Hopkins’ stake of nearly 16% is now worth £170m as the share price has lost 60% of its value in a bloodbath for Wall Street shares.
Exscientia was part of a transatlantic trend that is challenging government attempts to build a biotech powerhouse in the UK. Abcam, a pioneering Cambridge antibody company, recently announced that it would move its listing from the UK to the US “We are a British company; we choose to be in Oxford because we can attract global talent,” says Hopkins. “But to be seen as a global company, we trade on what is the global technology index, which is Nasdaq. What we have now is an incredibly international shareholder base from all over the world.”
The company devised the first AI-engineered drug to enter clinical trials: a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder in partnership with Japan’s Sumitomo, though Sumitomo later decided not to pursue it. The Japanese firm is currently studying another drug developed by Exscientia, for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease psychosis, in the first human trials.
Hopkins, now 50, fell in love with science thanks to an inspiring chemistry teacher. He has worked as a scientist since the age of 16, when he did a stint in industrial chemistry at the Port Talbot steelworks in south Wales, which he says taught him about the benefits of automation to increase productivity.
He spent nearly a decade at US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, where he was on a “data warehouse” project that led to some of the first applications of machine learning in the pharmaceutical industry, with the findings published in Nature in 2006.
For the next five years at the University of Dundee, he continued to investigate the application of data mining and machine learning to drug discovery. He says that “being a teacher is actually one of the best jobs in the world” and gave him the freedom to investigate AI methods in depth. He maintains his ties to the university, where he is an honorary professor of medical informatics in the College of Life Sciences.
Exscientia (which means “of knowledge” in Latin) soon moved into the Schrödinger Building in Oxford Science Park and now employs 450 people around the world, from Vienna to Boston, Miami and Osaka, split evenly between engineering and AI, chemistry and biology.
It is building a new robotics lab in Milton Park, near Oxford, focused on automating chemistry and biology to speed up drug development and its stated goal is “AI designed medicines, made by robots”. Other pharmaceutical companies have also introduced some automation to their processes, but overall the lab technology is similar to how it was when I was a student in the 1990s, says Hopkins.
The firm is involved in 30 projects, some in partnership with large pharmaceutical companies, including France’s Sanofi and US-based Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). He is also working with the University of Oxford on the development of drugs targeting neuroinflammation for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Among the company’s individual projects, a cancer drug for solid tumors is about to enter its first clinical trials.
Exscientia is also working on a broader coronavirus pill to compete with Paxlovid, the Covid-19 treatment made by Hopkins’ former employer Pfizer. This work is funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which took a stake in Exscientia. The company’s other investors include BMS, Celgene (now a subsidiary of BMS) and Germany’s Evotec, as well as Japan’s Softbank, US fund manager BlackRock and life sciences investor Novo Holdings.
Hopkins says the team has identified a set of molecules that could work as a broader treatment for Covid-19, new mutations and other coronaviruses, with more news to come later this year. The firm is targeting a low-cost pill that could be distributed globally and quickly administered to people who get sick to prevent serious illness and hospitalization. Covid-19 infections are rising again in 110 countries and World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that the pandemic is far from over.
Companies in the pharmaceutical industry have started to use AI in recent years. AstraZeneca is investing heavily in it for its entire research and development infrastructure, and GSK has built an AI team of 120 engineers, with plans to grow to 160 next year, making it the largest in-house team in the industry. .
AI systems require a lot of computing power and huge data sets. Its use should increase the number of new drugs approved each year, usually 40 to 50 in the US, to many more. Hopkins confidently predicts: “This is the way all future drugs will be designed. In the next decade, this technology will be ubiquitous.”