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Schrödinger, the drug discovery computer platform supported by Bill Gates, hedge fund manager David E. Shaw and Google Ventures, closed its last round of financing at $ 110 million, as investors backed its new investment plan. development of his own medicines.
New investors, including Invus, Pavillion Capital, a subsidiary of Temasek, and Michael Antonov, one of the co-founders of the virtual reality company Oculus, have joined the fundraising round, raising it closely 30% since the announcement of the tour.
The company has so far focused on providing its technology to pharmaceutical customers. The platform was used for the discovery of two anticancer drugs – the Agios and Enosidenib ivosidenib, now marketed by Agios and Celgene – which were approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. .
"Our platform has been validated time and time again on hundreds of targets in real-world drug discovery projects," said Ramy Farid, managing director of Schrödinger.
The fundraiser will help Schrödinger to launch its first 100% potential oncology drug candidate. The company hopes that its first potential drug will be ready for testing by next year.
Karen Akinsanya, Senior Vice President and Chief Biomedical Scientist, joined Schrödinger last year at Merck to lead its new drug discovery programs. She hopes the technology will speed up the process considerably, which can take several years and cost billions of dollars.
Akinsanya said the emergence of large sets of genetic data has opened the way for a "broad set" of potential targets for the sector and that Schrödinger's technology has created an "exhaustive list" of "very powerful molecules" may become drugs for the targets.
Schrödinger is one of many companies to explore the possibility that a large computing power can accelerate the first tedious and expensive steps of developing a drug.
Relay Therapeutics, a Boston-based startup, raised $ 400 million from investors, including the SoftBank Vision Fund, while in Silicon Valley, Insitro had raised more than $ 100 million from investors. , including Andreessen Horowitz, and signed a contract with Gilead Sciences earlier in the year.
But there have also been failures: IBM recently announced that it would stop selling its Watson for artificial intelligence platform for drug discovery, although it continues to serve the existing customers.
Schrödinger was founded in 1990, well before the last generation of start-ups. His approach simulates the physics of compound operation, rather than simply using deep learning to process existing data in search of models.
Mr Farid said that it was "incredibly complicated" to teach the principles of physics to a computer, the exact coordinates between each atom to the way the molecules behave in the water.
"It was a really very difficult problem. Much more difficult than anyone else realized. It took thousands of investment years from Gates and Shaw and thousands of years of time spent on a computer, "he said. "That's why the very simple idea of pattern recognition does not work reliably."
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