CAS BioFinder accelerates drug discovery

Over the past year, drug discovery has gotten a massive boost from the CAS BioFinder Discovery Platform, which allows scientists to explore known and predicted data that accelerate the preclinical process.

“If we can make a single drug get to market faster or increase the hit rate of therapeutics by just a couple of percent, that has a huge impact on human health,” says Adam Sanford, director of life sciences products at CAS.

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society that specializes in the management of scientific knowledge, has the most comprehensive collection of human-curated scientific data.

The CAS Content Collection, which provides data the BioFinder uses, is propelling the drug discovery process by providing highly structured data to every member of a drug discovery team: chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and beyond. CAS BioFinder lets scientists explore an ever-evolving list of datasets, including biological sequences, structure-activity relationships, ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion) measurements, toxicity, and biomarkers for different drugs and diseases.

The approach to drug discovery is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, and CAS BioFinder is designed to help build bridges and make connections faster than ever before.

“There are no longer these bright lines that carve up science—the interesting research is happening in those interstitial spaces,” CAS vice president and chief science officer Michael Dennis says.

In May 2024, CAS BioFinder became available to customers, and in its first year, feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Biotech and pharmaceutical developers are eager for the platform to continue expanding. “CAS BioFinder is evolving every day,” Dennis says. In addition to the platform’s functional improvement, its content is expanding.

To aid in that evolution, CAS created the CAS Life Sciences Advisory Board, composed of global thought leaders from commercial, academic, and government organizations in the drug discovery space. New ideas for data aggregation come out of almost every advisory board meeting or session with CAS BioFinder customers. “It is like an onion: every time you peel back a layer, there is another one,” Sanford says. “There is so much depth to drug discovery.”

Throughout its first year on the market, CAS BioFinder has reflected the speed with which technology is driving change in drug discovery. Even though CAS has been working with artificial intelligence for a long time, it was serendipitous that CAS BioFinder launched as the global AI transformation was beginning to take hold. The need for structured data is becoming increasingly important. “Generative technology is really changing how people search,” Sanford says, including in the drug discovery process.

The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the need for a platform like CAS BioFinder by illustrating some of the pain points in creating a vaccine. “There is nothing like the absolute tragedy of a global pandemic to help recognize there are some [fundamental] data problems,” Sanford says. CAS BioFinder and tools like it could streamline the process of finding a vaccine in a future pandemic.