Matxalen Uriarte, founder and CEO of the company specializing in computational biotechnology, explains how advanced biomedical data analysis makes it possible to predict the real effectiveness of drugs and anticipate side effects.
(Autor: Mireia Ochoa)
Universal Omics is a company specializing in computational biotechnology that uses artificial intelligence and advanced data analysis to calculate the efficacy of drugs in non-communicable diseases, especially those of metabolic origin. Its founder and CEO, Matxalen Uriarte, explains how this approach can contribute to transforming pharmaceutical research.
The company focuses its activity on pathologies such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity-related disorders, and long COVID. Its approach consists of analyzing metabolism as a complex network made up of multiple interconnected nodes. “A molecule has a greater impact on some points than others, and we estimate how that active ingredient will affect the therapeutic target and how it may alter other metabolic pathways.” This analysis allows for anticipating side effects and improving predictions about the actual efficacy of a drug.
For Uriarte, the current context favors advances in diseases that until now have been difficult to study. “AI allows us to access and process large volumes of very diverse data: omics, pharmacological, and clinical data.” Integrating all this information into a single analysis is, in their view, one of the main challenges in the biosciences.
The company has begun its research in the field of heart disease, focusing on arrhythmias. According to the CEO, there is currently no drug that cures these disorders, only treatments that help prevent episodes. Developing effective medications for this type of dysfunction requires a deep understanding of metabolism and a high capacity for data processing.
One of the key challenges for the sector is the integration of data of different types. “Biochemical data is not integrated with clinical data, and that is a universal problem,” Uriarte points out. To address this, Universal Omics is working disease by disease. After starting with arrhythmias, their goal is to expand the analysis to other heart conditions and, subsequently, apply the same approach to other non-communicable diseases.
