Artificial intelligence company Iktos has announced a collaboration with drug discovery company Sygnature Discovery in a deal designed to accelerate drug discovery and development.
The three-year deal will see Sygnature using Iktos’ de novogenerative design software Makya to facilitate rapid and efficient design of novel compounds and accelerate hit-to-lead/lead optimisation.
Makya is a generative AI-driven de novo design software for Multi-Parametric Optimisation (MPO). It is available either as a SaaS platform or for implementation on customer premises or in the customer’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Makya is based on Iktos’ generative AI technology, which helps bring speed and efficiency to the drug discovery process by automatically designing virtual novel molecules that have desired activities for treating a given disease.
Official comments
Colin Sambrook-Smith, Director of Computational Sciences at Sygnature Discovery said: “Late stage lead optimisation projects routinely generate substantial data sets which are ideally placed for exploitation by AI and Machine Learning technologies. Our experience with the Iktos Makya AI/ML technology demonstrates that it generates high quality compound ideas, the QSAR models can be rapidly updated, and the interface allows us to distribute the software broadly and quickly. We believe that Makya will allow us to blend our proven medicinal and computational chemistry expertise with the benefit of AI/ML technologies to impact compound design. This is why we have selected Makya to enhance how we help our customers with their lead optimisation projects, with a view to reducing the number of compounds required to identify pre-clinical candidates and so keep overall costs and timelines down.”
“We are very pleased to collaborate with Sygnature Discovery, they truly are a leading integrated drug discovery CRO and with a great track record. We are excited and proud to announce our first multi-year collaboration deal in the dynamic CRO sector and to have Sygnature’s scientists use our software to speed up their customers’ discovery programmes,” said Yann Gaston-Mathé, Co-founder and CEO of Iktos. “We are more than ever committed to make our technology available to biopharma companies around the world and maximise the impact of AI on the productivity of drug discovery.”
