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.
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.
Receptor.AI
London-based Receptor.AI provides an AI-powered drug discovery platform for pharma, biotech, and academia, aiming to cover the entire end-to-end process of automated drug discovery. Receptor.AI develops a next-generation drug discovery platform based on the synergy of AI, computational chemistry, and biomimetic technologies, such as organs-on-a-chip. According to the company, their target identification process involves all the possible relationships of biological entities, followed by the drug candidate design and success scoring.
In February 2021, they received seed funding of $0.5 million. In August 2022, Rreceptor.AI introduced their SaaS platform for rapid and precise drug design: for example ADME-Tox prediction module incorporates more than 40 elaborate AI models, which simultaneously evaluate various pharmacokinetic parameters and potential modes of toxicity for every hit candidate produced by virtual screening.
TandemAI
Based in Shanghai, TandemAI is dedicated to integrating proprietary AI-driven, high-performance computation with large-scale in-house wet lab operations.
Their physics-based molecular simulations allow the visualization of drugs interacting and binding with protein atoms in motion. Artificial intelligence is used to process the data, perform computations, and create models which lead to insights. Finally, their in-house supercomputing clusters are purpose-built to optimize drug discovery workflows.
The company received its $25 million seed and pre-series A funding in December 2021 from two investors: OrbiMed and Chengwei Capital.
Congruence Therapeutics
Congruence Therapeutics is a Canadian biotechnology company working at the intersection of computational and experimental drug discovery to design novel small molecules for rare diseases. Their specific focus is diseases associated with protein misfolding, so the company designs new pharmacological stabilizers, a validated class of small molecules. As tools Congruence uses structural bioinformatics, computational chemistry, and machine learning, having an in silico platform for drug discovery.
In February 2022 company raised $50M from multiple investors, led by Amplitude Venture Capital and Fonds de solidarité FTQ.
Degron Therapeutics
Shanghai-headquartered Degron Therapeutics aims to discover novel molecular glue degraders for cancer treatment and other therapeutic areas. The company spun out of the lab of cofounder Yong Cang, a professor at ShanghaiTech University, and is based at JLabs, an incubator of Johnson & Johnson.
In June 2022, Degron raised $22 million in series A financing, which will be used to advance the company's GlueXplorer platform. GlueXplorer is a molecular glue-based targeted protein degradation platform aiming to accelerate the development of novel drugs for previously undruggable targets in oncology, inflammation, metabolic disease, rare diseases, and other therapeutic areas. Degron's platform uses a combination of phenotypic screening, proteomic screening, and AI to predict novel targets and accelerate compound discovery.
META Pharmaceuticals
Based in China, META Pharmaceuticals is utilizing the power of metabolism to modulate the immune system to treat various diseases, including a broad range of autoimmune diseases and cancer. The company partnered with XtalPI, a well-known player in the AI-powered drug design field, to co-develop first-in-class drugs. META has built an AI-enabled, multi-omics-based target discovery platform for metabolic pathways, dubbed META-Map, that can sift through thousands of metabolic proteases for specific therapeutic effects.
In January 2022, META raised $15M as seed funding from four investors: Tiantu Capital, IMO Ventures, XtalPi, and Forcefield Ventures.
Poolbeg Pharma
Dublin-based Poolbeg Pharma is a clinical-stage infectious disease pharmaceutical company targeting the growing infectious diseases market. The pipeline of Poolbeg includes a small molecule immunomodulator for severe influenza and a first-in-class, intranasally administered RNA-based immunotherapy for respiratory virus infections. Poolbeg is utilizing AI in two main directions: to identify the drug candidates with a higher success score and to improve the design of the clinical trials, ensuring the best match between the patient’s profile and therapy.
In February 2022, Poolbeg signed an agreement with OneThree Biotech Inc, a biology-driven AI company, to identify new drug targets and treatments for a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). A month later, in March 2022 the company signed a deal with CytoReason, an AI company developing computational disease models for efficient drug discovery and development, to provide AI analysis of Poolbeg’s influenza disease progression data derived from human challenge study samples.
Ainnocence
US-based Ainnocence is next-generation biotech aiming to create a self-evolving modularized intelligent platform that integrates various advanced computational and wet lab technologies to revolutionize drug discovery and development. They leverage the AI drug discovery system to characterize the molecular interaction and properties of protein molecules. They own several AI-driven platforms for small molecules, biologics, and degraders.
The company received its $4.6 million funding from Genesis Capital in June 2021. In March 2022, Ainnocence announced a partnership with Sino Biological, adding Ainnocence's AI-based prediction technology to its current antibody development CRO services offering.
ReviR Therapeutics
ReviR Therapeutics is a US-based research and development company that aims to harness advanced technologies, machine learning/AI, and the inherent biology embedded within RNA to develop novel medicines. Their AI-based platform assists with target discovery, followed by the drug discovery process, forming the closed-loop system.
In January 2022, ReviR raised $20 million on a seed/pre-A series financing round from multiple investors led by 5Y Capital and CDH Investments. ReviR Therapeutics also teamed up with an AI-driven company XtalPi to create an RNA small molecule drug discovery platform based on AI+DEL technology.
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