Accenture announced it has made a strategic investment through Accenture Ventures in Turbine, a predictive simulation company building a platform for interpreting human biology. Accenture’s investment will help Turbine extend its platform to global biopharma companies that can benefit from Turbine’s ability to uncover hidden biological insights, which have the potential to guide and accelerate key drug development workstreams.
Turbine’s core technology – the Simulated Cell platform – utilizes machine learning to understand how human cells make decisions. This platform models molecular interactions within and around cells, enabling virtual experiments in volumes nearly impossible to achieve in the physical world and revealing mechanisms that drive diseases and therapy responses.
Turbine’s platform is now being validated with leading pharmaceutical companies to uncover promising drug targets, select patient populations most likely to benefit from therapy and identify combination therapy regimens that could increase therapeutic benefit in certain patients. This enables Turbine to reveal treatments otherwise hidden from view and potential drugs that work in the lab but would likely fail in clinical trials.
Turbine is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, which is an engagement and investment program focused on working with companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. And Project Spotlight offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients, helping startups harness creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology. Additional digital simulation companies in Project Spotlight include QuantHealth, Virtonomy, and Ocean Genomics.
The terms of the investment were not disclosed.
KEY QUOTES:
“Advanced technology and digital capabilities are clearly becoming substantial differentiators in the biopharma industry, and the future of drug discovery will be powered by AI. Turbine’s AI-based platform has clearly demonstrated the ability to unlock high-quality biological insights for our clients across the biopharma industry.”
- Tom Lounibos, global lead of Accenture Ventures
“Turbine’s Simulated Cell™ platform has emerged as a valuable tool for global biopharma companies to gain insights into the intricacies of biological systems, which can lead to the development of targeted treatments. Our investment reflects our commitment to supporting technology and digital capabilities that drive innovation in AI-based drug discovery, all with the goal of providing more effective treatments and enhancing patient care.”
- Petra Jantzer, Ph.D., a senior managing director and global lead of the Accenture Life Sciences business
“Since most unsolved complex diseases are heterogenous, progress in utilizing AI for drug discovery is hindered by ethical and technological limitations in sourcing deep and diverse ground truth data. To bridge this gap, we need a toolkit that can learn fundamental rules of biology on in vitro experiments and apply to patients that it has never seen before. Turbine’s Simulated Cells can be engineered at scale to represent the heterogeneity of complex human disease better than currently available wet lab experimental models, which are inherently biased towards representing certain disease types and hardly scalable. By tapping into Accenture’s expertise, we hope to expand our market reach and augment our simulation platform in order to benefit the whole biopharma industry by ensuring that the next experiment is always the correct one.”
- Szabolcs Nagy, co-founder and CEO of Turbine
