Category: Our News

Challenge: Despite the availability of antibiotics, bacterial infections remain a major and growing health threat. Antibiotic resistance is a leading cause of deadly hospital-acquired infections worldwide. In 2017, the World Health Organization published a list of high-level threats bacteria for which new antibiotics are urgently needed. Among them, Staphylococcus aureus (SA) and its persistent forms,…

Challenge: Respiratory tract infections (RTI) are a leading cause of morbidity, mortality, and hospitalizations globally. Yet, many cases of RTI still go undiagnosed and RTI is often treated empirically because the etiologic agent(s) is unidentified. The current diagnostic approach is complex and often takes days to weeks. It may also fail to detect a broad…

Challenge: One of the major concerns in the development of a new compound by the chemical, pharmaceutical or cosmetic industries is to assess its ability to induce cutaneous allergic reactions. Indeed, the industry must be able to predict such risk and classify it before commercialization of new molecules. To date, these tests are performed on…

Challenge: The design of superior biologic therapeutics such as monoclonal antibodies, single-domain antibodies, and engineered proteins requires optimizing their ability to bind to disease targets. Antibodies offer many advantages over small molecules in treating diseases, but the process for generating them is complex, expensive and often requires further steps of affinity maturation to achieve the…

Challenge: Protein-protein interactions (PPI) are well recognized as promising therapeutic targets. Although interfering peptides capable of inhibiting PPIs are receiving increased attention, the identification of those that possess high biological activity is very challenging due to their enormous diversity. There is thus a need to use bioinformatics and machine learning to effectively predict if a…

Challenge: Binding promiscuity plays a major role in medicine as promiscuous drug interactions may lead to undesirable cross-reactivity effects. This represents a considerable challenge for the pharmaceutical industry. Drugs act by modulating the function of target proteins. However, additional off-site non-target proteins may also be affected due to similarities between binding sites. This unintentional effect…

Challenge: Biological systems are often difficult to implement and maintain in an industrial setting. There is a large number of parameters to optimize and the complexity is great. Artificial intelligence (AI) can assist in uncovering patterns and identifying features among parameters that can improve the effectiveness of a process as well as the requirement for…