Almirall has announced a new partnership with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputión (BSC-CNS) and Nostrum Biodiscovery to find new therapies for dermatological diseases.

The collaboration, ARTIBAND, will explore artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) approaches to design new protein-protein modulators for new therapies.

Estimated to affect 1.8 billion people, dermatological diseases consist of conditions that irritate, clog or damage the skin, as well as skin cancer.

AI in the pharmaceutical sector has great potential, especially in areas of generative chemical modelling.

By training platforms using chemical data to develop generative algorithms for chemical modelling, these AI and ML platforms can propose new chemical materials based on the learned language model, proposing compounds that are different and better-suited to those found in compound libraries.

Over the next three years, the technology will be developed and trained with data from the public domain and, as part of a second phase, the technology will be further optimised and applied to the discovery of new protein-protein modulators of Almirall’s interest.

The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation funded the project as part of the EU-funded Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.

The project builds on the current-standing partnership between Almirall and BSC, which have been collaborating since 2018 in the research programme SilcoDerm for computational drug design for dermatological therapeutic targets.

"This collaboration, backed by cutting-edge generative AI and ML, opens new avenues to advance dermatology research,” said Víctor Guallar, BSC’s chief scientific officer.

“Applying AI to protein-protein modulator design not only discovers new therapeutic approaches but also fundamentally reshapes how we tackle and solve dermatological challenges,” stated Francesc Fernández, data science director, Almirall.

“Together, we aim to revolutionise the treatment landscape for dermatological diseases [and will] have a significant impact on patients' lives," said Alexis Molina, Nostrum Biodiscovery’s director of AI.