Merck Enters Dual AI-Driven Drug Discovery Collaborations, Leveraging Enki™ Platform for Novel Small Molecule Generation

Jan 26, 2024 16:10 CST Updated 16:10

Unnatural Products

AI Drug Developer

Recently, Merck has been frequently active in the AI pharmaceuticals field.

On January 23, Merck signed a $220 million Biobucks agreement with Unnatural Products (UNP) to further advance into the macrocyclic peptide field."Merck Announces New Collaboration, Betting on 'Next Wave of Drug Discovery' with AI"）

Two days later, on January 25,Developer of Enki™ Generative AI Platform for Drug Discovery, Variational AI, Announces Collaboration with Merck Research Laboratories on a Project Program Supported by CQDM Quantum Leap。

Variational AI was founded in September 2019. The company's founding team comes from D-Wave, the world's first commercial quantum computing company based in Canada.

Jason Rolfe, the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and Neural Computation from Caltech. During his time at D-Wave, he served as the Principal Machine Learning Researcher, leading the development of various cutting-edge AI models to interface with quantum computers and address real-world problems.

Jason Rolfe studied under Yann LeCun, one of the three giants in AI deep learning, a Turing Award winner, and the VP of Facebook's AI department.

Variational AI built and trained Enki™ as the foundational model, which can generate novel, selective, and synthetically accessible lead structures.

It is different from other generative AI foundation models and can design novel molecules much like DALL-E and Midjourney create novel images based on text prompts.

The Enki™ platform is also the first commercially available small molecule foundational model.

"Merck will evaluate Enki's ability to generate novel small molecules on its chosen targets," said Handol Kim, CEO of Variational AI.

Kim explained, "With the Enki™ platform, chemistsNo need to develop your own generative AI model, they can now submit their TPP andObtained within a few daysNovel, diverse, selective, and synthetically accessible lead compound structures, allowing for rapid progression to the lead optimization stage.

This collaboration has received support from CQDM under the Quantum Leap program.

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