Insilico is applying machine learning and GPU supercomputer to advance disease cures for cancer, Alzhimers and for antiaging

Discovering cures for cancer, for Alzheimer’s, for multiple sclerosis, for Parkinson’s, for the halting and reversing of aging itself, may not require the development of new drugs. It may mean discovering properties and therapies in drugs already developed and used for other diseases.

That’s the principle driving bioinformatics start-up Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based company utilizing GPU-accelerated NVIDIA advanced scale computing to power deep learning neural nets using massive datasets for drug repurposing research that targets aging and age-related diseases.

Drug re-targeting is not new. One of the best known cases is rapamycin, a drug originally thought to be an antifungal agent before it became widely used in in organ transplantation and then as a cancer fighter. Other companies have pursued drug re-purposing as a development strategy, but Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Insilico CEO, said his company using big data analytics to scale the strategy to a level never previously attempted.