BERG: Robust AI Technology for Improved Drug Discovery

Dr. Niven R. Narain, Co-Founder, President, and CEO

For the first time in many years, people are making a genuine, collective effort toward one specific goal: defeating the pandemic of 2020. Healthcare practitioners worldwide are being supported by IT professionals and AI experts for this cause, who strive to streamline the various drug discovery processes to procure a vaccine as soon as possible. However, there still remains a handful of hurdles for several contract research organizations (CROs) and Big Pharma corporations alike. According to Dr. Niven R. Narain, a pioneer in AI technology for clinical drug discovery and development, “The most notable challenge is the data aggregation process, where collecting and managing disparate clinical data sets is still proving to be a difficult task.” This, alongside the inability to seamlessly incorporate patient stratification biomarkers into disease prevention and drug development, heavily hinders the successful production of effective, new medicine. Dr. Narain, having witnessed the ill effects of disorganized clinical data, co-founded BERG LLC as a means to combine the true essence of biology with the latest developments in AI to help generate faster, more actionable insights to match the need and speed of drug discovery today.

AI has become a familiar tool across many industries, and its application within the healthcare sector helps illuminate the different types of biological trigger points that differentiate the healthy and diseased population;

We use computational data sciences to discriminate differential biology

BERG’s extensive subject matter expertise further bolsters a researcher’s ability to obtain desirable, data-backed results through improved professional collaboration. Since the company’s inception, Dr. Narain and his partners are focused on advocating for a collaborative business model that ties in collective goals and efforts to bring forth unbiased, front-ended hypotheses when developing new drugs. “BERG was among the first to usher in an approach to discovery that supports clinical processes via patient data-generated hypotheses, which are then implemented into a disciplined, pharmaceutically-oriented validation process,” expresses Dr. Narain.

The company’s Interrogative Biology Platform aids researchers in deriving more information from their systems’ biology approach to understand the mechanisms of any particular disease. The solution helps users profile a disease thoroughly by means of several patient biofluids, cell models and electronic medical records. Their proprietary platform then helps researchers work in tandem with BERG’s proprietary bAIcis analytics platform to create a multi-pronged network ecosystem that functions on a cause-and-effect principle. “A biological system is dynamic, and our platform highlights the areas that make clinical data more actionable,” states Dr. Narain. By triaging the newfound information in wet and dry labs, BERG’s AI competencies streamline the data analysis process for more expeditious predictions and provide actionable insights to move through the planning and activation of pre-clinical and clinical trials.
This newly knitted structure allows researchers to identify distinct disease indicators, which can be used to recognize and target new biomarker candidates. Interrogative Biology also supports users in repurposing existing assets for more efficiency, generating biomarker/diagnostics dataand improving patient stratification.

By providing such a powerful solution to the world of clinical research, BERG displays how it has successfully married biology with the data sciences, with AI as the key component. “We use computational data sciences to discriminate differential biology,” explains Dr. Narain, and continues to state that, “Building amazing partnerships with various large companies has significantly helped us better understand diseases.” This idea circles back to the company’s collaborative outlook. As an organization that believes that one must be humble to pursue biotechnology, BERG works with both private and public health entities, including defense departments, to push the focus ‘back to biology.’

Moving forward, the company intends to further develop its platform’s capabilities and scale the process toward commercialization. “Prevention is better than a cure,” says Dr. Narain, and while everyone has heard it before, BERG continually creates opportunities that leverage collaboration and expertise for a healthier tomorrow. With BERG’s Interrogative Biology platform improving existing research methods in oncology, neurology, and rare diseases, patient care is set to witness a new medicinal revolution.