AION Labs, the first-of-its-kind venture studio spearheading the adoption of AI technologies and computational science to solve therapeutic challenges, announced today the launch of ProPhet, a new startup leveraging artificial intelligence to identify active small molecules for drug discovery.

ProPhet was formed following AION Labs' startup challenge focused on AI-powered drug discovery of new high-affinity small molecules. It aims to address the critical market need to accelerate, refine, and enhance the early stages of drug discovery by targeting proteins that are challenging due to limited information, while significantly reducing the time and cost of identifying potential drug candidates for these targets.

Determining the structure of target proteins, a critical first step in drug development, has traditionally required exhaustive processes in wet labs, such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and crystallography. While the advent of AI has provided several methods to predict the structure of proteins from their sequence, it has not revolutionized the world of drug discovery as anticipated.

"Proteins are influenced by their surroundings, which can cause them to adopt various possible conformational states. Our platform enables us to both evaluate these different states and screen vast small molecule libraries against them in a highly scalable manner," said Tom Shani, PhD, CEO of ProPhet. "AION Labs has provided the perfect environment for our company to grow, with the opportunity to partner with the strongest players in the pharmaceutical industry to optimize our design process. This ensures we are well-aligned with the industry's priorities and needs."

ProPhet addresses the biological and computational challenges by using state of the art machine learning technologies, including diffusion models and large language models to develop optimized novel algorithms.

Along with Dr. Shani, ProPhet's founding team includes CTO Amitai Mordechai, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer Avital Sharir-Ivry, PhD, and JJ Ben-Joseph as Chief AI Officer.

"Small molecules constitute the majority of developed drugs, making ProPhet's approach particularly vital through its broad applicability across a wide range of treatments," said Mati Gill, CEO of AION Labs. "Dr. Shani has formed the ideal team for this space, possessing the perfect combination of biological, chemistry and computational expertise. We are excited to support ProPhet with the necessary resources and connections to succeed."

 

Source: prnewswire.com

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