Investigating the role of claudins in gastrointestinal cancer using Artificial Intelligence – CLAUD-IA

Claudins (CLDNs) are cell surface proteins essential for maintaining cell polarity and barrier integrity. Evidence from patient samples and preclinical models shows that CLDNs are overexpressed in solid tumors, playing a key role in cancer development and metastasis, making them valuable therapeutic targets. Monoclonal antibodies targeting CLDN1 and CLDN18.2 are in clinical trials for advanced epithelial cancers. However, the mechanisms by which CLDNs drive cancer progression remain unclear, and identifying new CLDN-targeting agents could open further therapeutic opportunities. The project CLAUD-IA will harness generative artificial intelligence (AI) to investigate the roles of CLDNs in gastrointestinal (GI) cancers and to tailor novel CLDN-specific compounds for cancer therapy.
This research combines long-standing expertise in gen-AI-driven drug design and CLDN biology from teams in Canada and France. By integrating public and proprietary transcriptomic datasets, we aim to identify new therapeutic targets against GI cancer and discover new drug candidates. Generative AI will be central to this work, analyzing large-scale transcriptomic data to uncover new CLDN expression patterns to decipher biological pathways. Additionally, AI-generated predictive models will lead to the discovery and validation of a new generation of small molecules specific to CLDN1 and CLDN18.2. The development and application of these advanced generative AI tools will allow us to scale our analysis, explore extensive datasets, and identify novel therapeutic targets and drug candidates beyond the state of the art.
This international, multidisciplinary collaboration – uniting molecular biology, data science, and clinical expertise – aims to deepen our understanding of GI cancer and drive the discovery of new therapies.