Founded in 2021, this biotech start-up wants to give promising but flawed drugs a new chance for market approval.
The world of drug development is one that often includes many hurdles before success.
The road from R&D to market is long, particularly due to vital and comprehensive clinical testing to ensure that a drug is not only effective, but also safe for the public to consume. More often than not, drug candidates fail during various stages of clinical trials, with some sources stating that approximately nine in 10 drug products never reach the approval stage.
There are a number of reasons why a drug might fail these trials, such as efficacy, poor planning and safety, leading to potentially promising treatments being binned for good. However, our Start-up of the Week believes that some of these drugs can be saved.
Ignota Labs is a biotech start-up that wants to turn around promising drugs that would otherwise be written off with safety issues.
According to co-founder and chief scientific officer Dr Jordan Lane, 56pc of all drugs that enter development fail clinical trials because of safety problems, such as liver toxicity.
“We are taking the most promising of these and fixing them using our AI platform, so that they can re-enter clinical trials for approval,” Lane tells SiliconRepublic.com. “This gets an otherwise abandoned drug into the clinic in timeframes that would previously have been impossible.”
How it started
Lane has an extensive background in biochemistry, genetics and the AI drug discovery space. Prior to founding Ignota Labs, he held various strategic roles in the biopharma industry, from developing oncology assets at AstraZeneca to spearheading AI-driven drug discovery projects at LabGenius and BenevolentAI.
15 years ago, Lane met Sam Windsor – who previously worked on DeepMind’s AlphaFold commercialisation team – at university and the two kept in contact over the years with interesting projects. “Together we worked through the issues of drug development and refined our position until we found something truly special and novel, focusing on drug safety as an unsolved problem,” explains Lane.
This led the two to Dr Layla Hosseini-Gerami, who was doing her PhD in an AI drug discovery lab at the University of Cambridge. “Her drug mechanism of action AI was world-leading and exactly what I had imagined as the perfect tool to understand these complex problems,” says Lane. “Luckily, Layla was also very entrepreneurial and was open to two strangers asking if she wanted to create a company with them!”
Ignota Labs was established in 2021, with Windsor taking the helm as CEO and Hosseini-Gerami taking the role of chief data science officer.
How it works
Ignota Labs’ platform, Safepath, uses deep learning to address drug safety challenges by uncovering the mechanisms behind drug toxicity.
Unlike “traditional safety assessments” that identify what went wrong, Safepath combines cheminformatics, bioinformatics and multimodal data analysis to explain why and how safety issues occur, “delivering actionable insights to refine or repurpose drug candidates”.
“Our cheminformatics platform covers machine learning models from as much as the proteome as possible. We do this at different concentrations and across different species, ultimately creating over 15,000 models,” explains Lane. “When we have a new compound, we can recapitulate the on and (more importantly) off-target binding partners of the drug. This can then be used as an input to our bioinformatics tech stack that maps across the different pathways involved in that target.
“This is organised in a causal knowledge graph to facilitate traversing disparate datasets across a host of different omics databases.”
Lane says that the combination of cheminformatics, bioinformatics and “wet-lab validation” allows the team to build a compelling hypothesis, which then gives them the belief that a given toxicity problem is solvable. The start-up can then in-license the drug, develop the chemistry and bring the drug back to the clinic as quickly as possible.
How it’s going
As far as progress, Ignota Labs has achieved some considerable success recently. In February, the start-up raised $6.9m in a seed funding round led by Montage Ventures and AIX Ventures, and Lane says more exciting developments are on the way.
“Since we announced the acquisition of our first asset in 2024, things have been going exceptionally well. We have an incredibly exciting portfolio pipeline of drugs which we are assessing to confirm which have solvable toxicity issues,” he says.
“We are also nearly doubling the size of our team over the coming months, giving us more firepower across the tech, science and business development functions.”
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