Chief Technology Officer Exscientia, United Kingdom
Our mission at Exscientia is to encode and automate drug discovery. Ultimately, bringing together a suite of sophisticated computational design tools and methods with a scalable engineering platform and an automated physical laboratory. Exscientia has led the precision design of AI-generated molecules including creating the first AI-designed compounds to enter clinical trials. In this talk we will describe our approach to molecular design using our end-to-end patient centric, Ai enabled platform. We will explain how this approach has enabled Exscientia to tackle challenging target product profiles across a diverse range of targets. Crucially, we demonstrate how we have used this capability to develop several candidates that have either entered the clinic or are in IND-enabling studies. This includes targeting PKC-theta, LSD1 and MALT1, solving complex design challenges for each that have eluded AI approaches to date: kinase selectivity, brain penetration and allosteric inhibition, respectively. We will also discuss the importance of rapid design cycles and how virtuous learning loops are critical to driving projects forward. Automated synthesis and screening will play a pivotal role in the next leap forward in speed and productivity and we will discuss our progress in this area and how AI design is critical to the implementation of automated, digital laboratories.
