Owkin partners with Institut Pasteur to identify high immunogenic epitopes for COVID-19 vaccines

Owkin, a startup company that deploys artificial intelligence (AI) and Federated Learning (FL) technologies to augment medical research, accelerate drug development and enable scientific discoveries, announces a collaboration with the Institut Pasteur, a private, non-profit foundation whose mission is to help prevent and treat diseases, mainly those of infectious origin, through research, teaching, and public health initiatives.

This collaboration will focus on developing a new machine learning model capable of identifying COVID-19, and more generally, any coronaviruses, protein sequences (as known as epitopes) with high immunogenic potential that could be used for peptide-based future vaccines. The machine learning models’ performance will be compared to existing models currently not taking into account the critical biochemical properties of such epitopes. Based on the challenges of such a current COVID-19 pandemic and the need for a vaccine, we are focusing our effort on defining peptides expressed by all present strains of the actual COVID-19 virus and any future human coronaviruses.

Mikhail Zaslavskyv, Chief Research Officer at Owkin:

We are really happy to start this collaboration, for us it is an unprecedented opportunity to help the Institut Pasteur in the development of vaccines to fight COVID-19, and to bring our machine learning technology to the bench to help to find a solution to one of the most difficult medical challenges today.