PEACCEL
Spearheading Innovation in Life Sciences through AI

It was 1956 when for the first time at Dartmouth College, the term "artificial intelligence" (AI) was coined. Almost six decades later, today, bursting all bubbles of scepticism behind its adequacy, AI has proved its mettle across all domains. Industries like Life Sciences, where the technological marvel is yet to make its mark, are also gearing up for harnessing the potential of AI. While the advantages of using AI are numerous, to successfully blend it within the Life Sciences pipeline requires ingrained knowledge.

This is where companies like PEACCEL are making a difference. Born out of the rooted experience and deep-seated expertise of industry stalwarts in the AI/Machine Learning/Deep Learning paradigm, Pr. Frédéric Cadet and Pr. Bernard Offmann, PEACCEL connects the links and effectively amalgamates Life Sciences and AI to open new horizons.

PEACCEL successfully bridges the gap between AI and the Life Sciences sector through its stellar "platform technology" that combines the benefits of various other technologies to solve the Life Sciences market's diverse impediments. Rather than using a "single-shot product," the company's group of technologies effectively tackles significant unmet societal needs and very concrete challenges in the field of Life Sciences enhances the chances of shifting to AI. "We have developed innov'SAR platform for our customers, supported by an exceptionally skilled team. In a way we are challenging the status quo is by making our tool beautifully designed, simple to use, and user-friendly," says Pr. Cadet, co-founder and president of the board of directors, PEACCEL. PEACCEL’S proprietary rational screening and discovery platform essentially includes four main modules–innov'SAR core, RAS module, GraphMut, and automISAR. While innov'SAR core optimises polypeptides and metabolic/signalling pathways, the platform's RAS module evaluates the combination of drugs in various diseases. GraphMut, on the other hand, generates a graph which shows at a glance the mutation relations between protein sequences and provides information on mutations to be avoided and the ones to be favoured. Finally, automISAR, tests in parallel over 130 algorithms concerning the dataset. In short, the company's innov'SAR approach is interpolative, extrapolative, and predicts outside-the-box, not found in other state-of-the-art ML or DL methodologies and yields better outcomes for clients.

Contrary to companies, who rely on existing datasets that are often messy and of low quality, PEACCEL's innov'SAR can generate new data to build reliable models.

Moreover, PEACCEL utilises the Fast Fourier transform (FFT) principle to encode and capture non-linear aspects of the protein sequences numerically. The company's innovative Sequence-Activity Relationship methodology identifies high fitness mutants from smart mutant libraries based on amino acids' physio-chemical properties, digital signal processing, and regression techniques. Using the FFT technique allows PEACCEL to mathematically treat globally the protein sequence and all possible interactions inside/between the amino acid residues and better identify the epistatic phenomena. Effectively detecting the numerical patterns from the protein spectra, the robust innov'SAR subsequently identifies high performing mutants with combination of mutations not previously explored and eradicates the need for alignment-based amino acid sequences. Billions of new mutants are screened virtually. Moreover, it also diminishes extensive datasets and lowers the strenuous computational times required in legacy ML/DL approaches. "What distinguishes PEACCEL is our capability to produce massive amounts of new data to train its ML/DL platform," says Laurent Contaut, CEO of PEACCEL.
Through its state-of-the-art solution, PEACCEL makes designing of proteins as drugs, diagnostics, or other applications much more spartan, cost-effective, and less time-consuming. Coupled with AI, the company enables customers to develop model-based enzymes and therapeutic antibodies. Further, it makes analysing the metabolic effect of multiple drug interaction effortless by using the AI-based in silico modelling technique. In addition, PEACCEL harnesses AI's benefit to ensure smooth flow of enzyme-related substances and further optimises fermentation in bioreactors by modelling more than 100 millions experimental conditions for better yield.

At heart, PEACCEL draws its strength from a highly agile, result-driven scientific team whose proficiency ranges from AI including Machine Learning and Deep Learning to statistics, mathematics, biology, bioinformatics, structural biocomputing, business development, and disparate fields in the medtech, biotech, and pharma space. The company's lean organisational structure allows it to reach maximum clients and deliver high-quality results within allocated budget and timelines. This positions PEACCEL to be a partner of choice in AI along the entire drug development continuum from discovery to pre-clinical and clinical trials. The way PEACCEL operates with its customers is via co-development or via strategic partnerships. "We accompany our partners with our innovative technological platform and an agile, focused, highly skilled team which results in a faster, cheaper, and de-risked advancement of programs for our clients," remarks Laurent Contaut, CEO.

To that end, PEACCEL has actively participated in numerous projects and made noteworthy wavelets. In one instance, the company was appointed by the FDA in the U.S. to assist them with a research program on enterotoxins. Pr. Cadet highlights that due to their highly stable nature, enterotoxins are difficult to denature and hence find use as potential weapons of biological wars. To curb this problem, PEACCEL, together with the FDA, joined hands to study and understand the inactivation process of enterotoxins. The FDA in the USA has been favouring the use of modelling and simulation in silico in development of drugs, which is also what the EMA in Europe has recently started to favour as well. Presently, in the wake of Covid-19, the company is also playing a pivotal role to solve the shortage of COVID-19 tests due to the lack of patented enzyme reverse transcriptase. Credits to its innov'SAR, in merely six-eight weeks, PEACCELcould successfully identified an alternative enzyme for making more reliable COVID-19 test kits. Besides, it recognised three components for the COVID-19 metabolic pathway and was able to model/simulate a potentially potent fixed drug combination (FDC) treatment using the RAS module. In addition, PEACCEL’s automISAR module (based on neural networks) has successfully modelled a cell-free synthetic system for the production of green biohydrogen.

With innovation and Science at its core, PEACCEL is well-positioned to address the current paradigm shift in the Life Sciences industry. The company supports its clients in the R&D panorama to efficiently demonstrate the safety, efficacy, and quality of products using the three basic pillars such as in-vitro/ex-vitro/in-vivo models for animals, clinical trials in humans, and adding pillar number 4 i.e. modelling and simulation in silico. In essence, PEACCEL is built around the four Ps for success: Platform, Patents, Papers and People. Apart from creating ripples with its robust innov'SAR platform, the company has strategically published a total of 15 papers in less than two years. Besides, the France-based firm has already filled three patents, thereby sending a strong message of its capabilities to potential investors, collaborators, partners and investors. PEACCEL has presently emerged as the key player in the Life Sciences landscape. The company is helping companies working in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and chemical space to navigate the intricate AI realm and propelling them to accelerate drug discovery, decrease associated costs and risks without jeopardising the quality of the development programs at the behest of the promising technology. The result is an increase of chances for drugs to reach the key pharmaceutical markets; “We want to continue doing what we are best at in the years to come. We also look forward to being clearly identified as “The AI company in Life Sciences” eminent player in the AI-driven Life Sciences domain,” concludes Laurent Contaut.