Potential Sciences Launches With Seed Round for Physics-Based AI Drug Discovery
WIRED reports that British startup Potential Sciences launched on November 5 with seed funding in the tens of millions of dollars from SovAI, the UK's government AI venture fund, Twin Path Ventures and other investors; the precise amount and valuation were not disclosed. The company plans to build large-scale chemical datasets by simulating interactions from atoms up to molecules, amino acids and proteins, then use them to train AI models for identifying targeted drug candidates. Founder and CEO Hatem Helal says the goal is to make molecules that will fail clinically fail faster and to make bespoke, individually tailored medicines economical, while academics note that accurately predicting protein binding would require a marked leap forward.
The round places one of the UK's newest AI drug discovery startups among SovAI-backed firms such as Basecamp Research, Isomorphic Labs and CuspAI, backed by a fund with roughly $800 million and access to the national AI supercomputer; WIRED notes the approach's protein-binding accuracy is unproven and that faster candidate design does not remove safety and efficacy testing.
A new British startup believes that artificial intelligence is the key to speedrunning the slow and temperamental process of drug design.
Potential Sciences plans to build large-scale chemical datasets by using basic principles of physics to simulate interactions between atoms, then small molecules, then complex amino acids and proteins. With that data, it’s betting it can train AI models and prediction systems capable of identifying highly targeted drugs for specific diseases, bypassing costly and time-consuming lab experimentation.
“We want molecules that are never going to work in the clinic to fail fast,” Hatem Helal, Potential Science’s founder and CEO, tells WIRED. “That means having better predictors of how they will behave as they interact with human biology.”
The startup, which launched on November 5, says it has seed funding in the tens of millions of dollars from SovAI—the UK government’s AI venture capital fund—and Twin Path Ventures, among other investors. The founders declined to disclose the precise figure or valuation.
If things pan out as Potential Sciences hopes, it could pave the way for the accelerated development of new treatments for all sorts of diseases. By reducing the cost of experimentation, Helal says, the company’s approach could also make it economical for pharmaceutical companies to pursue drugs for rare conditions that have previously gone untreated.
#Potential Sciences#SovAI#Twin Path Ventures#Basecamp Research#Isomorphic Labs#CuspAI