Iktos Brings its Gen-AI Drug Design Platform to AWS Marketplace

Iktos, a company developing AI and robotic technologies for medicinal chemistry and small molecule drug design, has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by becoming an "Advanced Technology Partner" and joining the AWS ISV Accelerate co-sell program. As part of this move, Iktos’s AI-driven drug design platform Makya is now available on the AWS Marketplace, aiming to improve access for pharmaceutical companies through AWS’s scalable and secure cloud infrastructure.

The partnership is intended to support Iktos’s stated broader goal of streamlining drug discovery by shifting from fragmented, locally-managed computational tools to a more centralized, cloud-based solution. Makya, designed with input from chemists, offers generative AI capabilities that facilitate the exploration of novel chemical space and the prioritization of promising compounds. Its interface is intended to be usable by both medicinal and computational chemists.

Makya's interface; Source: Iktos

Teijin Pharma, one of the early adopters, has begun using Makya via AWS infrastructure. According to the company, this setup has contributed to more efficient compound design workflows and could potentially accelerate research timelines. The use of AWS is expected to support scalability, data security, and integration with internal systems.

According to the company and AWS, the collaboration is intended to align with broader efforts in the life sciences industry to modernize R&D infrastructure, reduce manual processes, and integrate machine learning into early-stage drug development. Iktos presents Makya as a cloud-based solution aimed at lowering adoption barriers and enabling more iterative, data-driven workflows.

Iktos reports over 60 collaborations with pharma partners to date and is also advancing its own preclinical pipeline in areas such as oncology and autoimmune diseases. The company raised €15.5M in Series A funding in 2024, led by M Ventures and Debiopharm Innovation, to support further development of its technology and partnerships. In 2024, Iktos also acquired Synsight, expanding its platform with capabilities for targeting protein–protein and RNA–protein interactions. 

Iktos is advancing an internal drug pipeline focused on oncology, autoimmune, and inflammatory diseases, with two candidates in the hit optimization stage and two in the hit discovery stage. Iktos’s broader platform is an end-to-end solution that integrates generative design (Makya), retrosynthesis (Spaya), orchestration AI (Ilaka), and robotics for synthesis and biological testing.

Topics: AI & Digital