A new UK company – Potential Sciences – emerged from stealth today with a sizeable seed funding round and an ambition to transform drug discovery and development with AI.
The one-year-old startup is the latest to receive financial backing from the UK government’s £500 million Sovereign AI (SovAI) fund, and is working on a platform that “could make the design of new medicines faster, cheaper and more reliable than current methods,” according to the UK Department for Business, Innovation, Science, and Trade (DBIST).
Along with its financial contribution to the “eight-figure fundraise,” the support also includes access to the AI Research Resource (AIRR), the UK’s national suite of advanced supercomputers, including the Isambard-AI supercomputer in Bristol.
The new company’s approach to AI in drug discovery is built on an AI model that focuses on the fundamental laws of physics, rather than previous experimental data, and teases out interactions in molecules down to the atomic level.
It reckons that this could make the AI calculations needed to design new drugs 100 times cheaper than at present, with the potential to unlock discoveries in fields that are currently considered uneconomical. At the moment, it contends, AI models in chemistry are starved of data as they all learn from the same finite record of past experiments, or from simulations too crude to trust.
According to Potential Sciences’ founder and chief executive, Dr Hatem Helal, AI in drug discovery “has learned almost everything the existing experimental record can teach it. The next leap needs new data, and the laws of physics can supply it.”
He added: “We rebuilt quantum chemistry for GPUs so that gold-standard accuracy is affordable at the scale AI needs. When your code is 100 times more efficient, a seed round buys what used to take a dedicated data centre.”
The company – based in Cambridge – is bringing together mathematicians, physicists and chemists trained at Caltech, Cambridge University, and the CERN facility in Switzerland, and includes people who have built science-focused AI systems at Graphcore, Recursion, and Dayhoff Labs.
Other backers in the financing included Twin Path Ventures, which co-led the round with SovAI, alongside Blue Wire Capital, Lightfield Equity, Nauta Capital, Odyssey, Portfolio Ventures and Rule30.
“Potential Sciences is a startup that’s grasping an opportunity Britain is uniquely well-placed to capitalise on: using our deep expertise in data, fundamental science and computing to potentially unleash the next great wave of medical discovery,” commented AI Minister Kanishka Narayan.
“Solving chemistry’s ‘data bottleneck’ could allow researchers to explore new treatments for diseases that are currently deemed too rare or expensive to focus on,” he added. “This is AI at its best – pushing the boundaries of innovation, ultimately to improve people’s lives.”
Leave a comment