Sygnature Discovery deploys Iktos’ AI technology ‘Makya™’

We are thrilled to announce that we have embarked on a 3-year collaboration agreement with Iktos, an innovative technology company specialising in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for new drug design.

We’ll be deploying Makya™ to facilitate rapid and efficient design of novel compounds and accelerate hit-to-lead/lead optimisation, further optimizing our integrated drug discovery capabilities and improving on how we serve our customers.

The power of Makya™

Iktos have moved from strength to strength over the last few years and is truly regarded as one of the world leaders in AI for drug design. They have established multiple collaborations with renowned pharmaceutical companies and successfully developed the AI software platforms Makya™ for new drug design and Spaya™ for synthesis planning.

Makya is based on Iktos’ generative AI technology, which helps bring speed and efficiency to the drug discovery process by automatically designing virtual novel molecules that have desired activities for treating a given disease. It is a novel solution, validated through many collaborations, to one of the key challenges in drug design: the rapid identification of molecules that simultaneously satisfy multiple parameters, such as potency, selectivity, safety, and project-specific properties.

Driving efficiency in integrated drug discovery

Iktos technology, coupled with Sygnature’s continuous aim to build on our ability to deliver novel therapeutics to the clinic, makes the partnership very exciting for partners existing and new.

Colin Sambrook-Smith, Director of Computational Sciences at Sygnature Discovery commented:

“Late-stage lead optimisation projects routinely generate substantial data sets which are ideally placed for exploitation by AI and Machine Learning technologies. Our experience with the Iktos Makya AI/ML technology demonstrates that it generates high quality compound ideas, the QSAR models can be rapidly updated, and the interface allows us to distribute the software broadly and quickly. We believe that Makya will allow us to blend our proven medicinal and computational chemistry expertise with the benefit of AI/ML technologies to impact compound design.  This is why we have selected Makya to enhance how we help our customers with their lead optimisation projects, with a view to reducing the number of compounds required to identify pre-clinical candidates and so keep overall costs and timelines down.”

Gaston-Mathé, CEO of Iktos, added;

“We are very pleased to collaborate with Sygnature Discovery, they truly are a leading integrated drug discovery CRO and with a great track record. We are excited and proud to announce our first multi-year collaboration deal in the dynamic CRO sector and to have Sygnature’s scientists use our software to speed up their customers’ discovery programs”, said Yann Gaston-Mathé, Co-founder and CEO of Iktos. “We are more than ever committed to make our technology available to biopharma companies around the world and maximize the impact of AI on the productivity of drug discovery”