11 AI-powered Drug Discovery Startups Founded in 2021

The community of AI-driven biotech companies is continuously expanding, adding new players to the drug discovery race. In 2021 several dozen companies with AI-fueled platforms were founded, and they successfully continued raising funding and establishing strategic collaborations to expand their pipelines and improve computational capabilities.

In this report, we summarize some of the companies utilizing AI technology, which were founded in 2021. With the power of machine learning, computational chemistry, and AI-powered drug design in general, they aim to develop new therapeutics for rare diseases, autoimmune diseases, and cancer, address the protein misfolding and non-exomic proteins, and overall accelerate the drug discovery process.

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NonExomics

US-based NonExomics was founded to apply machine learning to discover novel drugs for diseases arising specifically from non-exom regions of the genome. The company integrates genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics to predict nonexomic proteins and identify disease-causing targets. So far, their part patent-pending and part proprietary methodologies have validated <250,000 such noncanonical proteins, the subset of which is associated with 1365 human diseases.

They received their seed funding of $0.2 million in April 2021, followed by the non-equity assistance funding from Illumina Accelerator in 2022. In September 2022, NonExomics entered a collaboration with Ordaōs aimed to create customized miniPRO™ proteins.

Omnia Biosystems

Omnia Biosystems is a London-based biotech company working to create a smart peptide therapeutics discovery system driven by neural networks. This is expected to optimize time and financial spending for peptide drug discovery for cancer treatment. Omnia’s BioPATH AI™ is fueled by artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve prediction accuracy on therapeutic outcomes, offering such services as biomarker identification, disease profiling, clinical trial design, hit discovery and lead design, and in vitro and ex vivo screening. Driven by computer-aided drug design, the company currently has four candidates in the pipeline.

Perspix Biotech

Germany-based Perspix Biotech is impacting the development of multi-specific antibodies for cancer treatment by bridging end-to-end automation of lab unit operations with AI-driven protein engineering. The Perspix Platform accelerates the development and optimization of novel biomolecular drug candidates using the closed-loop-feedback system while shortening the needed development time to a few months.

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Topics: Startups & Deals