They've created a cancer drug candidate for Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic in the US is often described as the best hospital in the- world, and is one of the most renowned medical research organisations. For years it has been working on a difficult cancer target known as GIPC1 - a protein that drives the growth and treatment resistance of cancers like pancreatic, breast, ovarian, colo-rectal, gastric, lung and kidney. It's been called a non-druggable target.Three years ago, Mayo Clinic approached Sravathi Al in Ben-galuru, a venture founded in 2020 by Kishan Gurram, Ramanaray-anan GV and Sivakumar S - all of whom had previously worked at GE and Sabic's technology centres in India - to identify a compound that could block GIPC1. Earlier this month, Mayo Clinic announced in a press note that their joint effort with Sravathi AI has yielded an experimental drug that slowed tu-mour growth, improved survival and enhanced the effects of the chemotherapy drug gemcitabine.The findings have been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Cell Reports. Animal studies and some toxicity studies have already been done. Additional studies are needed before it can be tested in people. Gurram says if all goes well, it will take about three years for the first drug to emerge.But what's been accomplished to date is a big advance for Sravathi and for India. Sravathi's AI platform allows for much faster discovery and development, at substantially lower costs than traditional methods. If the drug works, Sravathi will share the IP (intellectual property) of the molecule with Mayo Clinic. Even if it fails, Gurram says the AI approach enables them to go back, re-optimise quickly, retrain the model, and be back on track within a few months.Something that wasn't possible in the traditional approach.India is a world leader in generic drugs. India has also long been strong in services and contract research. But it's weak in discovery. Most of the country's drug-related work, Gurram says, has been done for others. Very few new drugs have been discovered in India itself. Sravathi, he says, is an attempt to turn that "unfinished one -- a reference also to the book 'An Unfinished Agenda: My Life in the Pharmaceutical Industry', the posthumously published memoir of Dr K Anji Reddy, founder of Dr Reddy's Laboratories, a man Gur-ram has been inspired by.Building the AI platform required combining multiple competencies- an art Gurram learned at Sabic. The platform rests on data science, bioinfor-matics, biology, biophysics and chemistry, with PhD-level expertise across those scientific lay-ers. "We have a number of PhDs in India. As a founder, I'm connecting the dots," he says.Parag Tipnis, Sravathi's CEO, explains the process like this:First, generative AI designs a large universe of possible molecules to treat a condition. For GIPC1, that number was 40,000.Then predictive Al uses multiple filters to whittle the list down to a few hundred. Molecular model-ling narrows it further. Physics- the molecules will actually stay bound to the target protein. Quantum chemistry finally explains which atoms constitute the molecule and can do the work best.Once Sravathi identified the most appropriate molecule, scientists at Mayo Clinic made the real molecules in a lab and tested them on cells and animals to see if they work safely.Typical cancer drugs work when molecules bind themselves to the target protein and inhibit them. GIPC1, Tipnis says, makes that binding difficult because it attracts other proteins, making their surfaces large and shallow, and activates multiple cancer pathways. This makes a normal small molecule much harder to design. But that's what Gurram and team have doneTo build their Al model, Gur-ram says, they used data from publicly available drug-molecule datasets, but also used Al-based extraction tools to pull data from the 1960s. The model was then trained on chemistry rules.Sravathi has won multiple international awards for their AI-driven chemistry and drug discov-ery. In 2024, they were placed in the top four of Standard Industries Chemical Innovation Chal-lenge, the following year they were among the four winners of the L'Oreal Big Bang SAPMENA competition that saw over 50,000 startups compete, and this Janu-ary, they won the International Startup Foundation (ISF)'s Juni-corn Global Summit excellence award in pharmaceutical innovation in Dubai.Gurram says his team has built a pipeline of nine proprietary assets, mostly focused on oncology. Two of them are in partnership with Mayo Clinic, and one with Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow.'The other six, we are doing it our-selves. Once we get regulatory ap-provals, we'll see if we partner for clinical trials." he savs.