In 1995, our founder Brendan Frey helped to lay the foundation for the highly successful artificial intelligence technology called “deep learning”. That’s the technology that’s changing everything, from farmers growing better crops to cell phones converting speech to text. In 2002, he faced a family medical crisis that led him to recognize that good drugs are based on good biology, but biology is too complex for humans to understand and accurately predict, especially at scale. So, Dr. Frey decided to focus on that problem. For the next 13 years, he and his team built artificial intelligence that could be used to successfully discover the genetic causes of disease and new therapeutic approaches to treat them. Their discoveries made the front pages of journals like Nature Magazine, and international newspapers, such as the New York Times.
By 2015, the artificial intelligence technology was so powerful that it was time to bring it to patients. The team founded Deep Genomics, whose mission is to serve patients by building and using artificial intelligence to discover and develop better treatments for genetic diseases, both rare and with large prevalence. In 2018 this artificial intelligence technology discovered how a specific Wilson Disease-causing mutation works, something human scientists hadn’t yet figured out (you can read our paper on that discovery here).
We have prepared a short video summarizing how Deep Genomics uses artificial intelligence to discover potential therapies that target these genetic diseases.