Biorelate’s Year in Review: 2024 — New Leadership, LLM Innovation, and Expanding Possibilities for Causal Targets

2024 has been a year of remarkable technological advancements for the pharmaceutical industry, driven by breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI). While AI holds immense promise, the challenge for large pharma in 2025 will be executing the right strategies to unlock AI’s full potential and achieve tangible returns on investment.

At Biorelate, we’ve been at the forefront of this transformation. Our expanding team of domain experts and strategic innovators, alongside our evolving product suite, has enabled us to collaborate with both major pharmaceutical companies and cutting-edge biotech firms. Together, we’re unlocking the true potential of AI—particularly causal AI—to revolutionise research and development.

Here are some of the key milestones that have shaped Biorelate’s journey in 2024:

Advancing Causal Target Hypotheses Beyond Current AI Capabilities

The future of drug discovery hinges on harnessing AI to uncover complex biological relationships that have remained elusive—insights that can fuel novel hypotheses and provide a competitive edge to drug developers. In 2024, we took a major leap forward by launching new endpoints in our API, enhancing target prioritisation and insight generation. These innovations include identifying direct binding relationships, uncovering novel biomarkers for medical conditions, and calculating shared biological network metrics to rationalise the relationship between a target and disease

These cutting-edge developments allow users to tap into the wealth of existing scientific knowledge, enabling deeper and more reliable insights into biological mechanisms and empowering better decisions on which targets to prioritise for lab validation.

Leading the Charge with Large Language Model (LLM) Technology

2024 also saw Biorelate integrate the latest advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) to augment our industry-leading text mining capabilities. Among these innovations is generative AI knowledge graph summarisation, which quickly distills mechanisms of action behind target-disease relationships from the most relevant literature.

Looking ahead to 2025, we’re excited to launch expanded LLM features. Our latest breakthrough using LLMs comes with us reimagining Galactic AI™ itself, putting this breakthrough technology right at the core of our Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline to enhance our existing transformers and proprietary technology. This new approach combines the power of LLMs with our 10+ years of experience and expertise in developing natural language processing models

We have recently completed the first phase of this pipeline's development and initial results have indicated that the LLM-enhanced version of Galactic AI™ identifies 53% more biologically relevant mentions, 33% more linked entities, and four times as many relationships than the existing pipeline.

New features also include LLM evidence summarisation capabilities allowing researchers to pose questions and instantly receive concise summaries of the most relevant findings from leading articles, with the underlying evidence available for deeper investigation. 2025 will also see the launch of advanced LLM article search functionality, simplifying the process of finding relevant research by querying Galactic AI™ in natural language.

Welcoming Dr. Ben Sidders as Chief Scientific Officer & Deborah Kobewka as Board Chair

In September 2024, Dr. Ben Sidders joined Biorelate as Chief Scientific Officer. With over 20 years of experience in data science across multiple therapeutic areas at Pfizer and AstraZeneca, Ben will further strengthen Biorelate’s ability to leverage advanced data science to extract valuable insights from vast biomedical literature, helping drug developers identify high-potential targets. Read Ben’s insights into maximising the impact of AI within R&D.

Ben was also featured on a recent panel alongside Nicola McCarthy (Head of Research, Milner Therapeutics Institute) and Namshik Han (Head of Computational Biology and AI, Milner Therapeutics Institute) discussing opportunities for biopharma to make better use of data for developing mechanistic rationales which will improve drug discovery outcomes for drug developers as well as patients.

We also welcomed Deborah Kobewka to our board as Chair. Deborah’s extensive leadership experience in healthcare and life sciences, both in the UK and internationally, will be instrumental in guiding Biorelate’s continued growth. Most recently, she served as CEO of Ito World, a global transit intelligence firm, where she championed sustainable growth through world-class capabilities.

Celebrating 10 Years of Innovation

Founded in 2014, Biorelate began with a bold vision: to unlock the "dark knowledge" in biomedical research and accelerate the discovery of life-saving therapeutics. A decade later, we continue to stay true to our roots, leveraging today’s scientific understanding to pave the way for tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

In celebration of our 10th anniversary, Biorelate’s CEO and founder, Dr. Daniel Jamieson, wrote an inspiring article reflecting on the key lessons learned during this exciting journey.

In this period, we have also led the way for thought leadership pertaining to knowledge graphs in drug discovery, hosting 10 seasons of the world’s only virtual conference focused on this topic and featuring speakers from across academia and the biopharma industry.

Discover more about Biorelate by exploring www.biorelate.com