The Israel Innovation Authority, along with companies like NVIDIA, Teva, Sheba, CytoReason, TerraCyte, and MeMed, is investing around NIS 70 million (approximately $23.3 million) to form a consortium aimed at advancing AI applications in biology, drug discovery, and personalized medicine.
This initiative will tackle the challenge of representing and integrating complex biological data, enabling the creation of AI models that can better understand biological processes, predict treatment outcomes, and assist in medical decision-making.
Central to the consortium’s efforts will be two key technological components: “Bio Tokens,” designed to standardize biological data representation, and the “Factory Model,” which facilitates the development and integration of AI-based biological models. Together, these will unite various biological data types into a cohesive computational framework serving academia, industry, and healthcare.
Collaboration is a core aspect, involving partnerships between industrial players, healthcare organizations, and leading academic institutions, with scientific leadership from experts across esteemed universities. The consortium seeks to build a shared, pre-competitive R&D infrastructure for the Israeli life sciences sector.
Initial applications of this consortium will focus on predicting responses to cancer treatments, assessing immune activity, predicting drug hypersensitivity, aiding medical decisions in sepsis cases, evaluating transplant rejection, addressing autoimmune diseases, and facilitating drug discovery.
