3 March 2021 - - US-based preclinical and clinical drug development company VeriSIM Life has been awarded a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant for USD 255,908 to conduct research and development work on rapid repurposing and translation of approved and investigational drugs for COVID-19 using its patented artificial intelligence driven biosimulation platform, BIOiSIM.

VeriSIM Life has developed a whole-body biosimulation platform driven by AI and machine learning, that accurately predicts the clinical efficacy of new drugs before human trials.

We are delivering strategic insights from our platform to translate, scale, and accelerate drug development to advance human health.

With support from NSF, we will be working toward our mission and addressing the rapid escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic by optimizing combinations and dosing strategies of FDA approved drugs as a repurposed, multi-targeted approach against COVID-19.

Vaccination and single therapies continue to scale around the world but we strongly believe our approach has a stronger potential to be more efficacious than a single drug target due to the multifactored-polygenic infectious nature of the virus, and the new variants that are emerging rapidly around the globe.

The SBIR grant will help us continue to expand the capabilities of our biosimulation platform, to enable successful selection and deployment of drug combinations in a variety of diseases and conditions that are either rare or have the potential to be epidemic in nature.

The Phase I SBIR/STTR grant also awards VeriSIM Life with eligibility to apply for a Phase II (up to USD 1m) grant.

The applications of the BIOiSIM platform are indefinite and in the coming weeks we will participate in various NSF events and workshops to demonstrate our platform and work towards our goal.

VeriSIM Life is advancing the approach to preclinical and clinical drug development with a platform that delivers whole-body simulations and predicts the clinical efficacy of drugs before human trials.

Its approach model is built to accurately translate, scale, and accelerate development; derisking R and D decisions and enabling pharmaceutical and biotech organizations with the insights to propel innovation forward.

Critical Path Institute (C-Path) is a nonprofit, public-private partnership with the FDA created under the auspices of the FDA's Critical Path Initiative program in 2005.

C-Path orchestrates the development of drug development tools through an innovative, collaborative approach to the sharing of data and expertise, and accelerates the pace and reduces the costs of medical product development by building consensus among the participating institutions.

The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about USD 8.5bn that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering to startups as small business innovation research programs.