GATC Health Scientists and Leadership Featured as Authors on Two New Peer-Reviewed Publications Advancing AI-Driven Drug Discovery and Systems Biology

GATC Health Scientists and Leadership Featured as Authors on Two New Peer-Reviewed Publications Advancing AI-Driven Drug Discovery and Systems Biology

New papers in American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research and Advances in Clinical and Medical Research reinforce the scientific framework behind GATC Health’s Operon™ platform and the broader shift toward biologically grounded AI in therapeutic development

Irvine, CA — April 27, 2026 — GATC Health is pleased to share the publication of two new papers featuring GATC Health’s technology and scientific leaders as authors, further contributing to the growing body of literature on artificial intelligence, systems biology, and next-generation drug development. Across the two publications, GATC’s Ian Jenkins, Jayson Uffens, Vaishnavi Narayan, Waldemar Lernhardt, Valentina Savich, and Eric Mathur are represented as authors, helping to articulate the scientific rationale for how AI can move beyond narrow pattern recognition toward a more mechanistically grounded understanding of human biology.

The first paper, “Operon™ Platform–Enabled for Cardiometabolic Biomarker Screening and Precision Treatment Strategies: A Type 2 Diabetes–Centered Review with Cardiovascular Extension,” was published in Advances in Clinical and Medical Research on April 20, 2026 and includes GATC’s Ian Jenkins, Vaishnavi Narayan, Waldemar Lernhardt, Valentina Savich, Eric Mathur, Jayson Uffens, and corresponding author Jonathan RT Lakey (UC Irvine; Chair, GATC Health Scientific Advisory Board). The paper focuses on the complexity of cardiometabolic disease and the limitations of traditional clinical markers in capturing early mechanistic risk, patient heterogeneity, and differential treatment response, and outlines how multiomic integration can support AI-guided polypharmacology across the cardiometabolic continuum. It describes Operon as a proprietary, AI-driven internal scientific computing platform, operated by GATC scientists, that supports therapeutic discovery and development decision-making across the pharmaceutical lifecycle — including evaluation of efficacy, safety, off-target effects, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and overall development risk — with productized outputs such as the Derisq™ AI report delivered to biopharma, research, and insurance customers. 

The second paper, “Harnessing AI to Revolutionize Drug Discovery,” published in the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research on April 20, 2026, was authored GATC’s Ian Jenkins, Dhruva Gupta (Harvard Medical School), corresponding author Jonathan RT Lakey, and Lindsay Marshall (Humane World for Animals). Dr. Marshall joined the effort due to GATC’s role as the sole AI company in Human World’s non-animal working group. The company was selected to join Humane World’s working group due to GATC’s Operon platform training exclusively on human data, unlike other AI providers in the drug discovery and development field.

The paper focuses on how artificial intelligence can help transform preclinical drug development. The authors argue that traditional preclinical workflows remain costly, slow, and heavily dependent on animal models that often translate poorly to human outcomes, while AI-driven platforms like Operon can simulate human biological responses and, in some workflows, generate results up to 1,000 times faster than animal-based approaches — aligning with the U.S. FDA’s 2025 roadmap for phasing out animal testing in biologics development and the broader embrace of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) by the FDA, EPA, and NIH.