For Daniil Boiko and Andrei Tyrin, the idea for Onepot AI came from the same frustration.
“The best ideas in drug discovery were often blocked not by biology, but by synthesis,” Boiko told TechCrunch. Synthesis is the creation of new molecules by using chemical reactions. It’s like a recipe or Lego pieces, where small pieces, ingredients, molecules, come together to form a wider puzzle picture, a food dish, a larger molecule.
As one might expect, it’s quite hard to create those small molecules that go on to build bigger ones.
For Boiko, a Ph.D. candidate studying machine learning in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon (he received his bachelor’s and master’s in organic chemistry from a university in Russia), that meant realizing that drug hunters — the scientists who oversee drug discovery and development — were skipping promising ideas just because the chemical molecules to create the drugs seemed too hard to make.
“The compounds never even got a chance to be tested,” Boiko told TechCrunch.
For Tyrin (who received his bachelor’s in computer science at MIT), his time working on drug discovery computational pipelines made him realize how behind the world of drug discovery was. “The models could generate ideas in hours, but it could take months for the lab to catch up,” he told TechCrunch.
“We both saw that the world was throwing money into molecular design and almost ignoring the harder problem of actually making the molecules,” Boiko said. But there was a geopolitical angle too, he continued, global supply chains are becoming vulnerable, and the U.S. is entering a trade war and innovative competition, once again, with China.
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“It was clear,” Boiko said. “Small molecule synthesis needed to be rebuilt from the ground up in the United States.”
Boiko and Tyrin came together to create Onepot, a company that is home to the small-molecule synthesis lab POT-1. They also built Phil, an AI organic chemist, to help run experimental analysis to increase the process of compound synthesis for their early commercial partners. Those partners are biotech and pharma companies that are currently trying out their technology.
On Wednesday, the company came out of stealth with $13 million of funding, including pre-seed money, and a seed round led by Fifty Years.
“Currently, pharma and biotech companies either build entire teams of chemists in-house or work with contract research organizations overseas,” Tryin said of the process for molecular synthesis. Human chemists can spend months of research to create even a …