Biotech start-up Amply aims to develop innovative medicines using its AI-driven drug discovery platform.
The Belfast-based company Amply is using its own AI-driven drug discovery engine to fight aggressive cancers, such as triple-negative breast cancer, and drug-resistant pathogens, which threaten to make current antibiotics ineffective against infections.
“10 years ago, I began combining financial modelling expertise with computational biology to create a drug discovery platform,” said Dr Ben Thomas, CEO and chief architect of Amply, and a computational biology scientist, for whom the work has a personal edge.
“Evolution has spent billions of years perfecting natural defense mechanisms, and now we’re using AI to unlock this wisdom. This isn’t just professional for me. My father died from a drug-resistant infection our healthcare system couldn’t treat. At Queen’s [University Belfast], I built Amply to tackle deadly diseases differently, creating technology that will save lives when current treatments fail.”
When it comes to delivery, Amply is also working on developing nebulised treatments for chronic and drug-resistant lung infections using antimicrobial peptides that can be inhaled directly into the lungs.
“We’re deploying our platform against complex cancers and multidrug resistant pathogens that threaten our current antibiotic arsenal,” said Dermot Tierney, co-founder and chief operating officer at Amply. “This investment is a vote of confidence in Amply, especially given the challenging fundraising environment for seed-stage biotechs.”
The round was led by Twin Path Ventures, a specialist AI investor, with participation from US-based Venture Science, Co-fund NI, the British Business Bank and QUBIS Limited.
Amply is a spin-out of Queen’s University Belfast and was founded by Dr Ben Thomas, Dermot Tierney and Prof Chris Creevey. Last year, it raised £1.4m to invest in its drug discovery studio.
The biotech company has developed a drug discovery engine that combines AI, next-generation sequencing and synthetic biology to accelerate the discovery of cures for diseases caused by people’s different genetic variations.
Amply says the platform analyses biological molecules, identifies potential treatment targets and bio-prints real molecules that can be quickly tested and improved in the lab.
“With AmplyFolioAI the company’s scientists are decoding disease complexity, designing smarter biologic drugs and moving to a precision process which promises to be faster, cheaper and at a scale never before possible,” the company says.
“Data is the new oil,” said Twin Path partner, Katie Lockwood. “We’re impressed by Amply’s proprietary experimental dataset, their unique AI approach that incorporates human expertise and their ability to validate AI discoveries through in vitro and in vivo testing. The founding team exemplifies the cross-disciplinary expertise we seek in breakthrough AI investments.”
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