Meeting at the Intersection of Scientific and Technological Innovation

When cutting-edge science and technology converge

In this interview, Mark Mintz, Chief Information Officer, and Julie Frearson, Chief Scientific Officer share their insights around the latest technologies that are disrupting drug discovery and development, new approach methodologies (NAMs), and key considerations for 2024.  

Our impact on patients and communities across the globe is an accomplishment that few drug discovery and development organizations can claim. We are focused on building and enhancing digitally powered solutions that provide better accessibility to data and expertise. What progress have we made in intersecting our scientific and technological innovation?

Mark: Our focus over the last several years has been to digitally transform the way we work across four key pillars: commercial, operational, scientific, and general and administrative. Across all of these pillars, we have been reimagining our work and creating frictionless experiences that make us the preferred partner for drug discovery and development. Scientifically, we are working to leverage data and technology with the aspiration to create in silico solutions that strive to minimize risk and time to the clinic while also reducing animal use in research and adhering to the highest quality standards.

Julie: In the last two to three years, we’ve made significant progress in creating scientific technology platforms that allow us to keep pace with an inevitable revolution in how we conduct our science on a daily basis in terms of productivity gains (Digital Pathology), extracting greater insight from data (Bioinformatics) as well as in the size and depth of the experiments we can contemplate in therapeutic design (AI-Enabled Drug Design).  

Our excellent science paired with our digital transformation are drivers of our leadership position in the industry. What impacts have we seen in customer engagement, internal interactions with our people, and our scientific and tech capabilities?

Mark: As we continue to digitize across our businesses, we aim to create experiences for our clients and colleagues that drive engagement. With the launch of Apollo™, our secure cloud-based platform, clients can access and share real-time study-related information while unlocking a new world of speed and accessibility. In developing Apollo™ for Safety Assessment and Apollo™ for Biologics capabilities, we worked directly with sponsors and internal colleagues to understand the most important opportunities.

With their ongoing input, we created solutions that amplify the impact of our science by making data and services more timely, accessible, and formatted in ways that enable quicker and easier analysis, saving our clients and colleagues time and enhancing their user experience and engagement. To meet our customers’ evolving needs, we are focused on scaling Apollo across our capabilities through the continuous agile development of new features and datasets.

Julie: Our people are very active in, and enriched by, the external science and technology partnerships we engage in. These relationships expose them not just to advanced science and technology, but also to new business and cultural experiences. These partnerships offer an immediate enhancement of our portfolio and often catalyze internal innovation in our people—bringing a broader benefit beyond specific engagement itself.

Charles River is embracing innovation in science and technology to enhance the way we serve our clients and to bring novel therapies to patients faster. How are we leveraging innovation with in vitro and in silico methods to advance alternative methods in the industry?

Mark: With the acceleration of AI and Machine Learning capabilities comes the vast potential for in silico development models. To take advantage of these opportunities, we are constantly working on harnessing the vast amounts of data generated across our organization – in some cases working directly with clients to ensure data is properly categorized, cleansed, and made usable for broader modelling.

In parallel, we are advancing our in silico opportunities across multiple channels. For example, our partnership with Valo Health allows us to blend our expertise in science and AI-powered, human-centric data and computation to reshape the entire preclinical drug discovery process with Logica™. We are leveraging mutual data sets to develop models that when executed alongside our in vitro and in vivo capabilities, promise to significantly reduce the typical time from lead to pre-clinical candidate. In addition to building strategic partnerships, we are working internally and with clients to identify the highest impact and feasibility models that can enhance and accelerate the drug discovery journey.

Julie: We have been engaging in alternative methods for decades. The recent innovations in in vitro technology platforms coupled with a revolution in AI and Machine Learning has accelerated and increased the scope of potential for alternatives because we now have the technological capabilities to introduce human-centric models into all aspects of drug discovery and development.

We are investing in platforms that deliver authentic human cells and systems at scale to support efficacy and safety assessment assays as well as innovating in the systems that provide sophisticated organotypic screening paradigms. We also have several platforms that offer a non-animal version of traditional approaches such as in vitro-generated human antibody libraries (versus immunization), in vitro on/off target screening for antibodies (versus tissue cross-reactivity), recombinant cascade reagent (rCR) (versus endogenous LAL), and in vitro patient-derived screening platforms (versus in vivo models).

As we work toward enhancing our value through a lens of responsibility, what opportunities are we focusing on that contribute to our continued mission of accelerating drug development timelines that reduce animal impact while protecting patients’ safety?

Mark: Virtual Control Groups (VCGs) is an example of how we are taking a proactive approach to research and development. By leveraging historical control data, combined with data science to ensure statistical significance and comparability, we are working to develop opportunities to augment and/or replace concurrent control animals with virtual control data sets, matched to specific in vivo study designs.

With the feedback and insights gained from speaking with our sponsors we are working on an iterative path forward to determine how best VCGs can safely reduce animal usage while continuing to ensure that patient safety is never compromised. While VCGs are only one example, we continue to prioritize and analyze a pipeline of opportunities, many of which have the potential to reduce animal usage.

Julie: A recent survey conducted by Accenture stated that over 85% of drug discovery and development CEOs cannot envisage a future where AI and Machine Learning is not a central part of their toolkit. Technology enablement of science is at the core of how we can reduce animal impact while delivering better therapeutics to patients faster. This is possible through taking an “in silico first” approach to testing new hypotheses.

Appropriately and responsibly deploying AI and Machine Learning has the potential to change how we design therapeutics by creating self-learning cycles and producing higher quality, more de-risked candidate therapeutics by working in a larger design space, testing more attributes early and using a de-biased decision-making approach. AI also introduces the possibility of building digital twins of organs and animal models resulting in workflows where targets and therapeutics are first tested in silico, providing for more refined follow-on animal studies and triaging out approaches that are unlikely to work.

As we turn the page on 2023 and set our sights on 2024, what excites you most about the year ahead?

Mark: I am incredibly excited for continued development and eventual launch of even more transformative initiatives at the intersection of science and technology. Our Apollo platform will continue to grow with the addition of new end points and data sets with continued innovation around data access and visualization. In addition, we expect to continue our work on VCGs, which we aspire to grow and develop over time to be a lower animal usage option for controlled in vivo studies.

Beyond that, I am excited to continue partnering with our clients to jointly identify opportunities for advanced data access and collaboration on the highest impact opportunities that can have meaningful impact on the drug discovery and development process. I am excited about our ongoing work to develop these opportunities and creating an even larger portfolio of in silico capabilities that, over time, will grow to be at comparable scale and impact to our in vitro and in vivo capabilities.

Julie: We are now actively engaging AI and Machine Learning in a multitude of processes underpinning drug discovery and development from iPSC cell generation, small molecule design, oncology indication screening, and digital pathology. 2024 will be a critical year as we scale our deployment of this technology across our programs and projects to identify the true gains to help us define the shape and depth of our productivity revolution for our clients. We have exciting initiatives coming that will reinforce our intentional commitment to this purpose.

Looking beyond next year, I am particularly excited about ways in which we can model complex biological systems using AI, perhaps leveraging what has been learned in AI-enabled target discovery, to implement in silico models for toxicology. I also believe we are at the cusp of becoming a data-centric organization where we see re-use of data as much of a priority as the original purpose for which it was generated and look forward to clients and the ecosystem engaging with us in expanded, data-oriented business models.