How BioCorteX uses BigQuery to help answer the question “Will this drug work?”

Editor’s note: The post is part of a series showcasing partner solutions that are Built with BigQuery.

BioCorteX is a leading techbio company that’s focused on answering the almost impossible question: will this drug work? To find the answer, BioCorteX created the first biology emulator, which unlocks drug-bacteria relationships to discover and develop more compatible therapeutics. The company uses highly differentiated technology, backed by a scientific approach, with an understanding that while novel technology is valuable, it can only take you so far. BioCorteX owes its success to the combination of innovative technology, a cloud-first strategy, and a “unified biology” scientific approach that makes its offering so unique. 

Small interactions, big impact on clinical trials

The global pharmaceutical industry is currently spending nearly $250 billion a year on developing drugs with only a 4% chance of success,1 which highlights that the obstacles to regulatory approval can greatly limit the options for people living with health conditions. 

Recent research shows that the bacteria living on and within us can interact with drugs and lead to failed clinical trials. The goal of BioCorteX is to dive deeper into the relationship between bacteria and drugs to uncover whether a clinical trial is a true therapeutic failure. 

However, this task typically requires long wait times of weeks or months while having to clean and process extremely large volumes of data to move from hypothesis to validation. The inevitable demand on compute and storage resources is also very high, impacting cost and performance. This can prevent scientists and clinicians from making meaningful progress.

With the help of Google Cloud, BioCorteX is changing the biotech landscape, achieving fast results that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.

BioCorteX has developed two complementary technologies that are accelerating this change. The first is called Carbon Knowledge™, an extraordinarily large biology-based knowledge graph with over 3bn nodes and 16bn edges, stored on BigQuery. The second is the foundational emulator, Carbon Mirror™, which builds on Carbon Knowledge™ to uncover hidden interactions between bacteria, the human physiology, diseases, and drugs. Actionable insights from Carbon Mirror are already informing deep mechanistic understanding and greater certainty of treatment response to enable the accelerated development of sophisticated drugs at scale. 

In developing these capabilities, BioCortex adapted data-intensive emulation technologies that have been tried and tested in aerospace and applied them to the life science and pharmaceutical domains. These techniques go beyond traditional modeling and simulation capabilities and are crucial when delivering results in mission-critical system design in aerospace. The structured management and interrogation of vast quantities of data in BigQuery is key in enabling the BioCorteX technology ecosystem to deliver unique actionable insights.

“We live in an exciting time for techbios. Only a few years ago, developing scalable solutions the size of our Carbon Knowledge and Carbon Mirror would have been unthinkable for startups our size. For example, BioCorteX has run in-silico trials of every single approved oncology drug on the market in populations in the USA and Japan using Google Cloud in a time- and cost-effective manner.”—Dr. Mo Alomari, CTO and Cofounder, BioCorteX 

“It is exciting to see techbio companies such as BioCorteX continuing to break significant barriers in drug development with the help of Google Cloud. By reducing failure rates in drug development by considering a holistic drug ecosystem approach, BioCorteX has demonstrated the potential for incredible and direct impact on peoples’ lives. It’s cutting-edge companies like this that we believe will shape the future of drug development”—Shweta Maniar, Director Healthcare & Life Sciences, Google Cloud

How BioCorteX uncovers new therapeutic value

From day one, BioCorteX set the requirement of having daily releases of Carbon Knowledge to ensure clinicians and scientists are always up to date with the latest and most correct data. A big challenge was that the sheer number of pipelines being built, coupled with the scale and depth of the knowledge graph needed, would result in a large demand on compute resources. A huge query workload could timeout using conventional knowledge graph architectures, even if the company wanted to allocate extra budget and resources to have a specially designed infrastructure. 

BigQuery is able to facilitate these extremely large aggregations and return row counts in the billions, on demand. Going a step further, by using enhanced partitioning and clustering of tables, BioCorteX has been able to query subsets of the knowledge graph to meet the needs of Carbon Knowledge at any given point in time. This drives incredibly fast and cost-effective queries whilst abstracting away all the complexity from the end user.

This novel approach to knowledge graph design and development using BigQuery capabilities is continuously proving BioCorteX’s ability to unlock real value throughout the drug development lifecycle. With new drug bacteria interactions being discovered every day there is reason to be optimistic that a new dawn in clinical advancement in treatment of diseases is just around the corner. 

Reach out here to find out more about BioCorteX, its products and services.

The ‘Built with BigQuery’ advantage

Built with BigQuery helps companies like BioCorteX build innovative applications with Google Data Cloud. Participating companies can: 

• Accelerate product design and architecture through access to designated experts who can provide insight into key use cases, architectural patterns, and best practices. 

• Amplify success with joint marketing programs to drive awareness, generate demand, and increase adoption. 

BigQuery gives ISVs the advantage of a powerful, highly scalable unified AI lakehouse that’s integrated with Google Cloud’s open, secure, sustainable platform. To find how to harness the full potential of your data to drive innovation, learn more about Built with BigQuery.