The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Expansion on the way for spin-out Exscientia
DRUG DISCOVERY: Firm uses cloud computing to devise new candidate drugs
A Dundee company at the forefront of artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery has revealed plans to almost double its workforce.
Exscientia also wants to expand to larger offices in the city.
The firm last month announced a “milestone” deal with global pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, potentially worth 250 million euros.
The strategic research collaboration and licence-option agreement is in the area of metabolic disease.
Exscientia will be responsible for all compound design, whilst chemistry synthesis will be delivered by Sanofi.
Professor Andrew Hopkins is founder and chief executive of Exscientia, which was spun out of Dundee University in 2012 to develop new medicines for a wide range of human diseases.
“We are delighted that Sanofi is engaging with Exscientia in a comprehensive, end-to-end drug discovery project,” he said.
“This agreement highlights Exscientia’s ability to apply bispecific drug design in a comprehensive and highly-productive manner.
“Sanofi has put together an excellent experimental backbone for this collaboration and we look forward to delivering high-value projects for the company.”
Exscientia has a five-strong client list, and chief informatics officer Richard Bickerton is not ruling out winning even bigger contracts than the Sanofi one.
He said Exscientia had succeeded in blending the best human drug hunting experience with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to produce a worldbeating platform.
“AI is having an enormous impact across many fields,” he said.
“One of the most eye-catching has been Google’s AI system, which recently defeated the world’s best human players at the board game Go.
“AI is also impacting the game of chess, where human players use computers to help with their tactics while they remain in charge of strategy.
“In so-called ‘centaur’ chess – named after the human-horse hybrid from Greek mythology – this humancomputer combination can beat both human-only and computer-only teams.
“The Exscientia drug-discovery systems work along a similar centaur philosophy, with AI doing the tactical work and human experts concentrating on key strategic decision making.”
Mr Bickerton said the company is actively looking to recruit, with the 12-strong workforce expected to increase to 20 within 18 months.
That growth would necessitate a move to new, larger premises.
“Our strategic aim is to evolve from providing services to pharma; through early-stage drug-discovery collaborations; to taking our own candidates into clinical development and partnering these at high-value points; and eventually being able to develop candidates all the way to patients in select disease areas, generating our own sales,” Mr Bickerton said.