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Data Driven Discovery

Marina T Alamanou

Feb 08, 2024

🔝 News

Almirall and Microsoft partner on AI-powered drug discovery in dermatology

AlphaFold found thousands of possible psychedelics. Will its predictions help drug discovery?

Molecular Glue Revolution: TenAces Biosciences Unveils AI-Powered Drug Discovery Platform

⚙️ Vevo Therapeutics

Vevo Therapeutics established in 2021 in San Francisco is building the world's largest in vivo, single-cell atlas of how chemistry perturbs biology with Mosaic, the first platform to generate high-resolution in vivo data with single cell precision while capturing patient diversity in drug response.

In a single in vivo experiment, Mosaic can measure how a drug impacts cells from tens to hundreds of patients, generating millions of datapoints on drug-induced changes in gene expression, by measuring both phenotypic and transcriptomic changes in cell states. By pooling cells from 10s to 100s of diverse patients in one tumor and single-cell RNA profiling, they can determine drug action across all of those patients in one experiment. With this mosaic of patient cells, they can better represent patient diversity in drug response earlier in the discovery process, something that the classical in vitro models usually overlooks.

Founded 🎩 by Nima Alidoust, Johnny Yu, Hani Goodarzi and Kevan Shokat the company has raised a total funding of $12M over 1 round.

⚙️ Araceli Biosciences

Araceli Biosciences founded in 2022 in the US is utilizing AI for high content analysis during drug screening. Right know they are offering 3️⃣ solutions for diverse applications:

ARACELI Endeavor^® for complete scan in under 10 minutes (full well, full plate) in 4 channels at high resolution. Image quality & data quality, 0.27 micron per pixel, with full-well image fidelity.
ARACELI EndeavorGT^™delivers 6,000 Wells Per Hour, 35 Plates Every Working Day and 875 Plates Every Month.
Clairvoyance^™SOFTWARE delivers Neural Net Optimized Segmentation, utilizing existing trained neural networks for segmentation of cells, spots, nuclei, networks, etc. Unlike classical image analysis which relies on processing and intensity based segmentation, Clairvoyance uses dedicated neural networks to segment features to be analyzed. DL-powered neural networks are capable of handling differences between cells, wells, batches and even assays.

In 2023 Araceli announced it raised $2.23M.

Thoughtworks is a global technology consultancy that integrates strategy, design and engineering to drive digital innovation. They have vast experience creating adaptable technology platforms, designing world-class digital products and harnessing the power of data and AI to unlock new sources of value.

⚙️ Aimble

Aimble founded in 2020 in Seoul 🇰🇷 is an automated drug screening platform based on molecular dynamics and AI, developing an advanced platform based on DL (including its own database) for high-speed docking solution, binding force prediction solution and toxicity prediction solution. At the same time, in order to improve the accuracy of Aimble's DL model, the company is continuing to accumulate high-quality data generated from quantum calculations and molecular dynamics calculations.

Aimble's high-speed docking solution (through efficient use of a distributed computer system) is an automated calculation that calculates the docking structure and binding energy (docking score) of numerous compounds to the target protein and quickly classifies them according to this binding energy value in order to successfully discover meaningful active substances.

The CEO is Kim Hyun-jin and the company had a Seed investment in November 2020 (New Paradigm) and attracted Pre-A investment in May 2022 (Schmidt, Donghoon Investment).

⚙️ Rayca Precision

Rayca Precision founded in late 2021 in the UK is a pioneering force at the intersection of AI and bioinformatics, driving transformative advancements in clinical and preclinical research. They have 3️⃣ platforms: OncoCrest™, RSA2™ and WGS & WES for: Powering Up Bioinformatics Teams, Bioinformatics Excellence for Universities, Tumor - Drug Interaction Prediction, Transcriptomic Data Analysis, WGS (Whole-genome sequencing) and WES (Whole-exome sequencing) Data Analysis, Tumor Origin Detection and Prognosis Analysis and Monitoring.

The company was founded by Mahdi Muhaddesi Pouya Behrouzi and Mahmood Zali and has raised a total of $4.2M to date.

LiqBio in Taiwan 🇹🇼 is committed to the research and development of high-end medical analysis apparatus, integrating molecular biology, clinical, electromechanical, optoelectronics and software to develop the CytoExplore apparatus, that can assist in solving the clinical needs of rare cell sorting, such as Circulating Tumor Cells, Fetal Nucleus Red Blood Cells and Circulating Trophoblasts.

⚙️ Gradient Ventures

Gradient Ventures (California 🌵 US, 2017) is a venture fund from Google with technical mentorship for early-stage startups focused on AI. Through Gradient, Google will provide portfolio companies with capital, resources and dedicated access to experts and bootcamps in AI. Their median check size is about $4M (with checks as small as $500k and as large as $10M). They have done 95+ investments and invested multiple times in most of their companies.

Invests into ➡️

BenchSci, a world leader in AI solutions for preclinical R&D.
Flourish Labs on a mission to scale professional mental health peer support with tech to address the mental health crisis. And
Rad AI empowering radiologists with AI to save time, reduce burnout and improve patient care.

⚙️ AiBIOLOGICS

AiBIOLOGICS, founded in Dublin, Ireland ☘️ in 2019, has developed an AI tool that significantly expedites and refines antibody discovery, diagnostic development, vaccine design and immunogenicity mapping.

EpitopePredikt technology is a game-changer for diagnostic, antibody and vaccine discovery providing higher performance capacity with adaptability, significant reduction in manufacturing cost and lead times. Offers in silico modeling to accelerate discovery and development of serology-based assays, accelerates the development of vaccines (e.g. subunit & peptide vaccines) and provides in silico screening for potential immunogenic signatures of biological drug candidates for clinical evaluations.

EpitopePredikt’s DL will structure the algorithms in layers in order to create an “artificial neural network” that can provide intelligent solutions for biological design. The combination of AiBIOLOGICS recombinant epitopes with their proprietary peptide display platform ensures highly sensitive and specific detection of antibodies from any sample. This discovery and display platform is adaptable to any disease, in any organism.

AiBIOLOGICS is a sister company of Vertebrate Antibodies Ltd (VAL), an emerging biotech company established and incubated by the University of Aberdeen. Dr Ayham Alnabulsi is the CEO and co-founder of AiBIOLOGICS and he previously co-founded and currently heads Vertebrate Antibodies.

Yanjun Li is a tenure-track Assistant Professor (AI Initiative) in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy, University of Florida. His research interests span the fields of DL, AI-driven drug discovery and computational biology, with a particular emphasis on deep generative modeling for de novo molecular design and geometric DL for molecular recognition.

Before joining the University of Florida, Dr. Li successively worked as a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Deep Learning, Baidu Research USA, Sunnyvale, California, and at Calico Life Sciences, an Alphabet-founded research lab for human aging research.

⚙ Prescience Insilico

Prescience Insilico in India 👳 is a Synthetic Molecule Generator for drug discovery and materials discovery. They offer comprehensive services for in-silico projects, covering a wide range of areas including computational and AI-based drug design, lead identification, validation, formulation along with computational biology and chemistry.

Their platform PRinS ³ was designed to provide all modules for developing applications for targeted solutions in healthcare, energy and materials domains. Five 5️⃣ applications for drug designing are available now:

ChemIn for Cheminformatics,
BioIn for Bioinformatics,
SyMoG/AI for AI driven synthetic molecules generator,
X-HTVS for Multi-Target Multi-ligand high-throughput virtual screening and
X-ESS for Multi-Target Multi-Ligand Enhanced Sampling screening.

Founded by Sudip Roy, PhD and Jayant K. Singh in September 2019, Prescience has raised from NASSCOM CoE Incubation Program, Nasscom CoE-IoT, Startup Incubation & Innovation Centre and NASSCOM CoE IOT&AI.

⚙ QuantHealth

QuantHealth in Israel is an AI company conducting patient-centric drug simulations to accelerate and de-risk drug development, by combining over 1 Trillion data points (from over 350,000,000 patients 🤒, 100,000 molecules and 180,000 clinical trials) across the clinical and pharmacological domains. Their AI solution enables ClinDev and ClinOps teams to holistically simulate a clinical trial in thousands of variations within minutes, allowing users to evaluate each parameter on endpoint success, commercial viability, and protocol feasibility.

Their Large Healthcare Model (LHM) learns deep patient-drug interactions that drive high-resolution outcome models with 86% endpoint accuracy and continually adapts as new research comes forward, and can be further enhanced with internal trial data and proprietary research.

Founded in 2020 by Orr Inbar and Arnon Horev, the company received on January 8, 2024 an investment (for a total of 20M) through Accenture Ventures.

Drop Genie is building connected hardware to automate gene editing. Their first module performs gentle, non-viral transfection in a droplet, enabling arrayed CRISPR screening at the single donor resolution.

⚙ TK Analytics

TK Analytics in Ljubljana, Slovenia takes your drug discovery and high content screening to the next level with advanced image 🔬 analysis, AI and seamless data management.

CellusAI is their ground-breaking AI platform utilizing the depth of information embedded in cell painting images, facilitating immaculate image segmentation, precise profile extraction and streamlined downstream processing, bolstering predictions of bioactivity, mechanism of action, and toxicity.

Moreover, CellusAI provides increased performance in comparison to legacy analytical pipelines, such as CellProfiler, since with CellusAI

Segmentation is fully automated and does not require any user input.
CellusAI features are more informative, and
The analysis is faster due to support for GPU acceleration.

In 2023 TK Analytics was selected to join the NVIDIA Inception Program, a prestigious initiative designed to accelerate the growth of startups innovating in AI and data science.

TK Analytics was founded in 2018 and its CEO and founder is Tilen Kranjc.

⚙ April19 Discovery

April19 Discovery, founded in 2021 in London, UK 💂‍♂️, is combining together the latest in AI-powered computational chemistry and psychedelic drug design, to develop a unique class of compounds, which may provide a much-needed answer to the ever-rising threat of cognitive decline and dementia in our constantly aging population.

Initially, Enveric’s AI platform PsyAI identified molecules with psychedelic properties (that could carry minimal adverse effects, such as cardiac complications, while maximizing clinical benefit) from a large database of compounds. Then April19 flagged nearly 200 compounds within a few days, as Suran Goonatilake, a cofounder and an AI professor at University College London, said. The other two co-founders are Richard Dallaway and Jáchym Fibír.

The foundations of their scientific hypothesis originate from a research project that started at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague (UCT) and later included computational work done at University College London (UCL).

⚙ Skymount Medical

Skymount Medical in Canada 🍁 and its partner, Louisiana State University (LSU) in the US, are working together on innovative new drug therapies using DeepDrug™, their computer-aided drug design software. DeepDrug™ is an AI-based platform that has advanced into the semi-finals of the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition among 142 teams worldwide, and generates new target molecules from existing, pre-approved drugs.

So far, Skymount Medical and LSU created Inhibinol™, a nutraceutical formulation that leverages AI. By using the DeepDrug™ they were able to identify a unique combination of known vitamins and extracts to support immune health, such as vitamin D. Inhibinol also relies on familiar ingredients such as Ginseng and Chamomile (to aid with inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract) as a shield to help protect the body to fight off free radicals, which can damage cells and impact immune health. It also features zinc, biotin, vitamin E, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and more.

Reaction Oncology Platform offers one of the largest portfolio assays and a platform for integrated drug discovery of new kinase inhibitors.

⚙ Eleven Therapeutics

Eleven Therapeutics founded in 2020 in Israel is harnessing the power of synthetic chemistry and AI to reimagine mRNA therapeutics. By utilizing massively parallel combinatorial chemistry and AI algorithms to unleash the full power of RNA, they are mapping the universe 🌌 of RNA chemistry and reveal the structure-activity relationship of RNA molecules.

Their platform TERÅ beads is an end-to-end DEL-based platform to boost the performance of oligonucleotide therapeutics by DL the effects of chemical modifications. The first step of the TERÅ beads platform is to create a vast number of therapeutic RNA molecules with unique patterns of chemical modifications. During the synthesis of the therapeutic RNA molecules, they also create DNA barcodes on each bead that record the pattern of these RNA modifications, making them accessible to high throughput sequencing.

Then they incubate the beads with cells, so that each cell sees only a single bead. At this point they release the modified RNA oligos and DNA barcodes from the beads, and these molecules enter the cells and the RNA oligos exert their effect on the cells that they measure using a high throughput assay. Subsequently, they sequence the cells to reveal the identity of the DNA barcodes and decode the pattern of chemical modifications and associate it with the effect of the therapeutic RNA oligo on the cell.

Using the vast data that they collect, they train a DL framework to decipher the structure-activity relationship (SAR) of the RNA modifications and the output can be used for additional build-measure-learn rounds to refine the SAR and further optimize the RNA therapeutic.

In 2023, Novo Nordisk partnered with Eleven Therapeutics to identify new molecules that promote the precise delivery of RNA-based therapies. The collaboration will be focused on cardiometabolic diseases.

Eleven Therapeutics (with three collaborative hubs in Cambridge, UK, Boston, US and Tel Aviv, Israel) has raised a total of $26.3M in funding over 3 rounds and was founded by Dr. Yaniv Erlich, Shaul Ilan and Prof. Greg Hannon.

⚙ Omnes Capital

Omnes Capital is a leading European private equity firm dedicated to the energy transition and innovation. Its team drives long term partnerships with entrepreneurs aiming for growth and sustainability in the fields of renewable energy, sustainable cities, deeptech venture capital and co-investment. It has €5.7 billion in assets under management, 55+ employees based in four offices in Paris, Bruxelles, Munich and Zurich and was founded in 1999 in Paris, France.