Scipher Hopes IBD Alliance With Galapagos Is The First Of Many

Artificial intelligence specialist Scipher Medicine  has signed an inflammatory bowel disease collaboration with Galapagos that exemplifies what Scipher is hoping to establish as its business model – repurposing the AI it uses to sift through mountains of clinical-genomic patient data for its diagnostics business to also identify novel targets that may lead to drug therapies for non-responding patients. [Editor's note: This article has been corrected to note that Scipher's patient data are not derived from clinical trials.]

Scipher’s primary business is developing blood tests to enable clinicians to determine which autoimmune disease patients likely will or won’t respond to anti-TNF therapy. But alongside its precision medicine work,...