Molecule.one Raised $4.6m To Bring Theoretical Drug Molecules To Reality

Molecule.one is a Polish computational chemistry outfit that makes universal working environment software for synthetic planning chemists.

The company has raised the sum of $4.6 million in its latest funding round and plans on using this fund to fuel its plans of bringing theoretical drug molecules to life. The company’s machine learning systems operate by predicting the most suitable and viable ways of synthesizing potentially valuable molecules which is an important part of creating new drugs and treatments for diseases.

The company was part of the Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield. It was on this platform that Molecule.one described the challenges that the drug discovery industry is faced with. The company explained that many companies in the drug discovery industry can come up with treatments in theory but are faced with the challenge of making the molecules.

Now this is how Molecule.one works! When there is a new compound that probably no one has enough knowledge about that needs to be made and tested, this is where the company’s machine learning systems come in. The company works by creating a workflow that starts with everyday chemicals and provides step-by-step guidelines using already established methods to transcend from one point to another, and another.

The company’s CSO – Stanislaw Jastrzebski explained that the company leverages machine learning and vast knowledge of already established chemical reactions to create a process. “Synthetic planning can be characterized as a game. In each move of this game, instead of moving a piece on a board, we break a chemical bond between a pair of atoms. The goal of the game is to break down a target molecule to molecules that can then be bought on the market and used to synthesize the target. We use algorithms similar to the ones used by DeepMind to master Go or chess to find the synthetic pathway”, he explained.

Startups like Molecule.one gives hope to the future of medicine.