27 Jan 2025
The clinical trial volunteers gathered at Northwick Park Hospital on what seemed like an ordinary day in March 2006. They expected little more than routine blood samples and compensation for their time in confirming the safety of a new drug. However, this particular trial was about to go badly wrong. So wrong that within ninety minutes of receiving the experimental drug, TGN1412, all six were fighting for their lives caused by a dangerous immune system reaction. Though they survived, one lost fingers and toes, and all faced lasting health complications
While such extreme cases are rare, the sobering reality is that nearly 30% of clinical trials fail due to unforeseen toxicity. These failures not only halt promising treatments but inflate drug development costs to over $500M, before they even reach patients. Yet surprisingly, safety assessment remains under-resourced compared to other aspects of drug development, with toxicologists often relying on painstaking manual processes to evaluate risks.
The Challenge
Safety is sometimes described as 'efficacy in the wrong place' - and it's one of the hardest challenges in drug discovery. Finding an efficacious drug (one that treats a disease effectively) is hard enough. Anticipating all the things that can go wrong is harder still.
Various data sources each sketch a partial picture of overall risk, but it's complicated to combine them into a clear, systematic view that scientists can trust enough to make multi-million dollar decisions. The scientists tasked with understanding toxicity often work in small teams behind the scenes, yet bear enormous responsibility: preventing harm to human volunteers and ensuring new drugs are as safe and effective as possible.
Navigating Safety
The Sable story began with our founders Alex and Josh, who spent years collaborating closely with toxicologists and witnessing the challenges they faced. They saw how toxicologists rely on painstaking, manual processes to pull together safety data from a range of sources, often commissioning lengthy reports that still take weeks to produce.
And as other forms of technology have moved forward, the demand for better tools has only intensified. Drug discovery is an area already significantly augmented by AI and technology, which is able to shortlist ideas in rapid succession. As pharmaceutical research embraces more sophisticated methods and ventures into less-studied drug targets, the pressure to conduct thorough safety assessments earlier in development continues to grow.
Sable was founded on the idea of meeting that challenge: to harness advanced technology and transform the way safety is assessed.
The overall goal is captured by our mission - to navigate safety with augmented intelligence. We feel that “navigation” captures the essential difficulty in finding relevant information in an ocean of data, and avoiding the pitfalls along the way. Automating the process, while keeping scientists at the helm, can guide them toward better safety decisions.
Over 2024 we built the Sable Target Intelligence platform to meet this need, and focussed on meeting the top priorities of scientists - wide coverage of relevant data, novel approaches integrate the data into credible scores, with clear explanations that establish trust. We’re doing this by combining quality data engineering, informatics and AI/ML models - a complex design challenge.
The Future
In 2025 the Sable Platform will be in the hands of scientists. Our first major customer, a major pharmaceutical company, will use our platform to evaluate potential drug targets. To get here, our team has built a culture of rapid iteration, diverse thinking, and deep domain expertise. We enjoy developing and refining solutions to complex problems, and it's thrilling to do this in close collaboration with our customers.
Looking ahead, we envisage a future where scientists can evaluate hundreds of drug targets for safety in an afternoon, and meet the demands of scale and accuracy that are currently beyond reach. It’s time to bring onboard some driven and creative people to help meet the challenge of getting there.
If you’re keen to help us navigate this next stage in our journey, take a look at our job board. you'll be working with an exceptional team of AI and drug discovery veterans, including former leaders from BenevolentAI, in our Spitalfields office (well-stocked with tea, plants and low-quality pirate memorabilia). More importantly, you'll help build technology that could fundamentally change how drug safety is assessed, potentially impacting thousands of scientists and ultimately patients' lives.
If you're ready to tackle one of the most important challenges in healthcare, to work with a team that combines deep scientific expertise with cutting-edge AI, and to build something that could transform how we develop new medicines, we want to talk to you.
You can apply through our jobs portal here.
