Arctoris Opens Biophysics Centre To Target Data Bottleneck in AI Drug Design

Arctoris, a UK-based partnership research organization (PRO), has launched the Biophysics Centre of Excellence, a major expansion of its laboratory footprint and instrumentation aimed at producing the experimental data that AI-driven drug discovery pipelines increasingly demand but struggle to source at scale.

The problem the Centre is designed to address is that computational tools can now propose drug candidates far faster than traditional labs can test them. Generative molecular design has sharply increased the volume of compounds requiring experimental validation, and the bottleneck has shifted from design to measurement.

The expansion represents a reported tenfold increase in biophysical instrumentation, built around Arctoris' existing Ulysses platform—a robotic, cloud-controlled system that runs end-to-end experimental workflows across biochemistry, biophysics, cell biology, and structural biology.

Context

In 2024, Arctoris acquired Eli Lilly's automated Life Sciences Studio and relocated it to Oxford, adding to its robotic infrastructure. More recently, Arctoris was selected for the UK's ARIA AI Scientist program to support development of an autonomous research system targeting endometriosis.

The Biophysics Centre of Excellence brings industry-scale AI drug design to the UK and aligns with the UK's AI for Science Strategy, which calls for tighter integration between computational and experimental infrastructure

Instrumentation & partnerships

The Centre formalizes partnerships with Instromeda and SPRNexus focused on standardizing kinetic data generation and applying AI-assisted interpretation to surface plasmon resonance (SPR) datasets—a label-free technique that measures, in real time, how fast and how tightly a drug candidate binds to its target. The effort aims to turn what has traditionally been a specialist, low-throughput method into something that can run at pipeline scale.

Arctoris offers early access to Instromeda's SPRneo, an SPR system built to run with minimal human involvement. Instead of requiring researchers to design protocols step by step, SPRneo accepts a high-level description of what needs to be measured and handles protocol design, execution, optimization, and analysis internally.

The Centre also introduces FIDA Bio, a technology that measures how molecules interact in solution without attaching them to a surface. This keeps conditions closer to physiological, and is especially useful for detecting weak, short-lived, or complex interactions, including those involving membrane proteins that are difficult to measure with traditional methods.

What the Centre can measure

The expanded toolkit covers the core questions in early drug discovery: does a molecule bind its target, how tightly, how fast, and is the protein itself well-behaved enough to trust the data?

• SPR tracks binding to a target in real time, capturing how fast molecules attach and detach
• FIDA and MST measure binding in free solution, avoiding the need to fix proteins to a surface — useful for fragile or membrane-bound targets that don't behave well in surface-based assays
• ITC measures binding strength along with the heat changes that reveal the energetics driving the interaction
• SEC-MALS and DLS assess protein size and whether samples form unwanted complexes or aggregates
• nanoDSF tests how stable a protein is under heat stress
• LC-MS (BioAccord) confirms molecular identity and supports characterization workflows

Running compounds across multiple techniques helps catch artifacts that any single method might miss, a point Arctoris emphasizes as central to the Centre's design.

Topic: AI in Bio