Tag Archives: Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine (clinical stage end-to-end AI drug discovery company) has a documentary/hackathon competition: Docuthon: submit by August 31, 2023

This July 11, 2023 Insilico Medicine news release on EurekAlert announces a judge for their Docuthon contest along with some contest details,

Taryn Southern, a storyteller, filmmaker and speaker covering emerging technology who created an award-winning virtual reality (VR) series, as well as AI music and a sci-fi documentary, has joined the judging panel of Insilico Medicine’s Docuthon competition. 

Southern has been a sharp observer of the influence and rise of technology. She first gained public notice at age 17 as a semi-finalist on American Idol and later became a YouTube sensation, garnering more than 1 billion views. Soon after, she began actively pursuing her creative interests in emerging technologies and the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and VR to improve human life and potential. 

Clinical stage end-to-end AI drug discovery company Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”) launched the Docuthon (documentary hackathon) competition to invite participants from around the world to tell the story of AI drug discovery, using footage captured over the Company’s nearly decade-long journey. The competition provides a way for participants to share the achievements of generative AI in advancing new medicines through the story of Insilico’s lead drug for the rare lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which was discovered and designed by generative AI and has now entered Phase II clinical trials with patients. 

Southern says that as a young breast cancer survivor she is personally motivated to support AI drug discovery. 

“I can speak as someone with experience who has been diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, in my case stage 3 cancer,” Southern says. “When you’re in that situation you are looking for any possibility of hope. As we are just now beginning to see, AI-enabled drug discovery will rapidly shift the realm of possibility for these patients.” 

Since her breakout YouTube success in 2007, Southern has gone on to produce digital content and advise companies such as AirBNB, Conde Naste, Marriott, and Ford. She also released the world’s first pop album composed with AI, created an award-winning animated VR series for Google, made a video clone of herself, and directed and produced a documentary about the future of brain-computer interfaces called I AM HUMAN which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019.

Southern is also a three-time Streamy Award nominee, an AT&T Film Award Winner, one of the Top 20 Women in VR (VRScout), and was featured as part of Ford’s national “She’s Got Drive” campaign. She sits on the board of the National Academy of Medicine’s Longevity Challenge, which aims to award breakthroughs in longevity science, and invests in emerging tech companies like Cue, Oura, Vessel, Aspiration, and others.

Docuthon categories include best feature, best short, best curated, and most creative with prize amounts ranging from $4,000 to $8,000. Interested participants are invited to register. Submissions are due Aug. 31, 2023. [emphasis mine]

Southern says she’ll be looking for Docuthon submissions that connect on a human level. 

“With storytelling about technology, it’s important to not forget the human piece,” she says,“really focusing on the impact this will have on humanity and the people who are creating the technology and their personal stories.” 

“We’re thrilled to have Taryn join us as a Docuthon judge,” says Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine. “She brings creative vision to all of her projects and really understands how to tell compelling stories around emerging technologies.”

About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine, a clinical stage end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery [AIDD] company, is connecting biology, chemistry, and clinical trials analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques for novel target discovery and the generation of novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is developing breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system diseases, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and aging-related diseases. www.insilico.com 

There’s a bit more information on Docuthon’s Eventbrite registration page, Note: A link has been removed,

With an extraordinary design and tremendous calculation speed, artificial intelligence has become an inevitable trend in many areas of drug discovery. It helps identify biological targets, design small molecules for potential cure, and save a ton of research time.

AIDD is good news to the entire human society, but the society has not learnt much about this new technology. When did AI enable the first pipeline? What happened when it failed? How did scientists persist along the way?

Inspired by the movie AlphaGo, we believe the AIDD world deserves its own seminal film. Through the DOCUTHON, we seek to bring together documentary filmmakers and enthusiasts with those who believe in the potential of AI and care about human wellbeing.

Insilico Medicine will share a massive collection of footage showing every step of AI-powered drug discovery, participants are also welcome to use original contents including graphics and animations. A group of judges from both the science and film industries will decide the best edited films based on accuracy, creativity, etc.

This is an excellent opportunity to build your scientific storytelling portfolio AND win a big prize. And all the documentaries might be aired on our official websites and national video platforms. For more details, please visit insilico.com/docuthon or email us at event@insilico.ai

Insilico’s ‘splash’ page features four categories (scroll down about 40% of the way), the judging criteria and more details about submission requirements,

Best Feature

🎬 Best long-form entry
⏱ 16-60 min
💵 $6K award

Best Short

🎬 Best short-form entry
⏱ 3-15 min
💵 $4K award

Best CURATED

🎬 Best edited storyline among all entries
💵 $5K award

Most Creative

🎬 Most creative format or plot among all entries
💵 $5K award

JUDGING CRITERIA

Comprehensive narration of AIDD [artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery] and development of Insilico Medicine
Accurate referral and explanation of scientific facts
Creative and interesting approach that holds public attention

You may want to take a look at the Docuthon Competition Agreement (PDF). Not a lawyer—but it looks like you’re signing away almost all of your rights.

There isn’t a list of past winners although Insilico seems to have run the contest at least once before, from the YouTube page featuring the company’s introductory Docuthon video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LmmXEVyqh4), Note: A link has been removed,

704 views Dec 13, 2022

Artificial intelligence-powered drug discovery company Insilico Medicine announces a first-of-its-kind documentary film hackathon called Docuthon to encourage creative scientific exploration. Participants from around the world are invited to use footage provided by the Company to tell the story of Insilico Medicine and of advances in AI-powered drug discovery, an industry now at a tipping point. Films can be submitted as a documentary short or a documentary feature and cash prizes of up to $8,000 USD will be awarded for Best Feature, Best Short, Best Curated, and Most Creative. Submissions will be judged based on their success at telling the story of AI drug development and of Insilico Medicine, on their scientific accuracy, and on the level of creativity and ability to hold the viewer’s interest. Registration for the Docuthon is open through March 1, 2023. Submissions are due in April 2023, and winners will be announced in May 2023. Additional details can be found at: https://insilico.com/docuthon.

I’m not sure if you have to register for this latest version of the contest as the Eventbrite registration indicates a submission date only so you may want to contact the organizers.

Good luck and don’t forget the August 31, 2023 deadline!

Deep learning for cosmetics

Deep learning seems to be a synonym for artificial intelligence if a May 24, 2016 Insilico Medicine news release on EurekAlert about its use in the fields of cosmetics and as an alternative to testing animals is to be believed (Note: Links have been removed),

In addition to heading Insilico Medicine, Inc, a big data analytics company focused on applying advanced signaling pathway activation analysis and deep learning methods to biomarker and drug discovery in cancer and age-related diseases, Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD is the co-founder and principal scientist of Youth Laboratories, a company focusing on applying machine learning methods to evaluating the condition of human skin and general health status using multimodal inputs. The company developed an app called RYNKL, a mobile app for evaluating the effectiveness of various anti-aging interventions by analyzing “wrinkleness” and other parameters. The app was developed using funds from a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and is now being extensively tested and improved. The company also developed a platform for running online beauty competitions, where humans are evaluated by a panel of robot judges. Teams of programmers also compete on the development of most innovative algorithms to evaluate humans.

“One of my goals in life is to minimize unnecessary animal testing in areas, where computer simulations can be even more relevant to humans. Serendipitously, some of our approaches find surprising new applications in the beauty industry, which has moved away from human testing and is moving towards personalizing cosmetics and beauty products. We are happy to present our research results to a very relevant audience at this major industry event”, said Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.

Artificial intelligence is entering every aspect of our daily life. Deep learning systems are already outperforming humans in image and text recognition and we would like to bring some of the most innovative players like Insilico Medicine, who dare to work with gene expression, imaging and drug data to find novel ways to keep us healthy, young and beautiful”, said Irina Kremlin, director of INNOCOS.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Deep biomarkers of human aging: Application of deep neural networks to biomarker development by Evgeny Putin, Polina Mamoshina, Alexander Aliper, Mikhail Korzinkin, Alexey Moskalev, Alexey Kolosov, Alexander Ostrovskiy, Charles Cantor, Jan Vijg, and Alex Zhavoronkov. Aging May 2016 vol. 8, no. 5

This is an open access paper.

You can find out more about In Silico Medicine here and RINKL here. I was not able to find a website for Youth Laboratories.