French startup Iktos has secured €15.5 million in Series A funding for its AI-powered drug discovery platform. The round was co-led by M Ventures and Debiopharm Innovation Fund, with participation from Omnes Capital, and will enable Iktos to develop its technology further and expand its SaaS software offering. The company is set to launch Robotics, an end-to-end drug discovery platform that uses AI and automation of chemical synthesis to accelerate drug discovery timelines. Additionally, the company will expand its application of solutions to biological products, allowing it to offer fully integrated drug discovery services to the pharmaceutical industry. Iktos, which was founded in 2016, uses a technology platform for deep learning-based drug design that offers significant productivity gains in upstream pharmaceutical R&D.

Iktos is working with Astrogen to use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify small molecules as candidates for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. Under the collaboration's terms, Iktos will apply its proprietary machine-learning algorithm to virtually "sketch"molecules directed against a defined target and shortlist candidates for preclinical studies, the companies reported in a press release. That target is not yet public. In turn, Astrogen will screen the candidates in the lab and inside living organisms, and it will guide the development process from preclinical to clinical stages. The companies will work together in the production and selection of molecules that show the most promise as a Parkinson's treatment.

Pfizer has been on the headlines quite often recently. The Covid-19 vaccine is what made the company atop other field competitors. Remarkably, Pfizer has also yielded the benefit of US$900 million in the first quarter of 2021, thanks to its vaccine production and distribution programs. But behind the vaccine making and circulation, disruptive technologies played a big role in finding the correct drug and helped the company in its trials. Pfizer has effectively used artificial intelligence to conduct vaccine trials and streamline the distribution.

A "chemputer" is a robotic method of producing drug molecules that uses downloadable blueprints to synthesize organic chemicals via programming. Originated in the University of Glasgow lab of chemist Lee Cronin, the method has produced several blueprints available on the GitHub software repository, including blueprints for Remdesivir, the FDA-approved drug for antiviral treatment of COVID-19. Cronin, who designed the "bird's nest" of tubing, pumps, and flasks that make up the chemputer, spent years thinking of a way researchers could distribute and produce molecules as easily as they email and print PDFs, according to a recent account from CNBC. "If we have a standard way of discovering molecules, making molecules, and then manufacturing them, suddenly nothing goes out of print," Cronin stated. Beyond creating the chemputer, Cronin's team recently took a second major step towards digitizing chemistry with an accessible way to program the machine.