In most medical fields, developing a new medication typically costs a lot of money and takes over ten years. The majority of these products fail before they ever reach patients, even though scientists spend years testing thousands of them. However, could this process be sped up with the help of computers? What if artificial intelligence could be used to design a drug much faster? This is exactly what happened with Rentosertib, which is one of the first drugs designed using artificial intelligence and is still in clinical trials.
Recently, a global clinical-stage biotechnology company powered by generative AI has announced their new candidate drug for IPF (Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis). IPF is a chronic disease that affects the tissue around the lungs and alveoli. It causes scarring called fibrosis in the lungs over time, which can lead to serious breathing problems and is associated with ageing as well. The drug targets TNIK, which is a signalling protein that plays a key role in a pathway that controls growth, cell division and more. This pathway is called the Wnt signalling pathway. In diseases like fibrosis and cancer, this pathway can get overactive. Rentosertib blocks TNIK to slow or stop abnormalities.
Rentosertib is currently in human clinical trials, being tested for safety and efficacy. So far, it has been tested on 71 patients with IPF. The testing was done by randomly grouping patients into four groups, giving three of the four groups different occasions or dosages of the drug, and one group was given no drug (placebo), but neither the patients nor the doctors knew this. Groups that were on medication each received 30mg once a day, 30mg twice a day and 60mg once a day. Side effects such as diarrhoea and liver issues were reported for all, placebo and others. It should also be considered that some of the side effects were not related to the drug. The results after 12 weeks show that the lung function was worse for patients in the placebo group, while improvements were seen for the patients who received the drug. The lung function of the patients in the group that received 60mg once a day showed clear improvements overall. These results show a promising step forward for more use of generative AI in medical fields.
Bibliography
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03743-2
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40461817/
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/insilico-medicine-announces-nature-medicine-publication-of-phase-iia-results-evaluating-rentosertib-the-novel-tnik-inhibitor-for-idiopathic-pulmonary-fibrosis-ipf-discovered-and-designed-with-a-pioneering-ai-approach-302472070.html
- https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/idiopathic-pulmonary-fibrosis/