Charm Therapeutics applies AI to complex protein interactions, locking down $50M A round – TechCrunch

The world of AI-powered drug discovery keeps expanding as the capabilities of machine learning grow. One approach that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago is simulating the complicated interplays of two interlocking molecules -- but that's exactly what drug designers need to know about, and exactly what Charm Therapeutics aims to do with its DragonFold platform. Proteins do just about everything worth doing in your body, and are the most frequent targets for drugs. And in order to create an effect, you must first understand that target, specifically how the chain of amino acids making up the protein "folds" under different circumstances. In the recent past this was often done with complex, time-consuming X-ray crystallography, but it has recently been shown that machine learning models like AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold are capable of producing results just as good but in seconds rather than weeks or months.