Sygnature Discovery to Deploy Iktos’s AI for Drug Design Software Makya™

Iktos, a leading integrated drug discovery CRO headquartered in Nottingham, UK, with expertise across a range of therapeutic and biological target classes today announced a collaboration agreement in AI for new drug design.

Under the 3-year agreement, Sygnature will deploy Iktos’ de novo generative design software Makya™, which will be used by Sygnature scientists to facilitate rapid and efficient design of novel compounds and accelerate hit-to-lead/lead optimisation, reinforcing Sygnature Discovery’s drug design expertise delivering its integrated drug discovery solutions to its world-wide customer base.

In the recent years, Iktos has emerged as one of the world leaders in AI for drug design, establishing multiple collaborations with renowned pharmaceutical companies and successfully developing the AI software platforms Makya™ for new drug design and Spaya™ for synthesis planning.

Makya™, a generative AI-driven de novo design software for Multi-Parametric Optimization (MPO), is available either as a SaaS platform or for implementation on customer premises or in the customer’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Makya’s user-friendly interface enables it to be used by medicinal or computational chemists, and Makya can also be operated as a Python package through a Jupyter notebook interface. 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.

Sygnature Discovery serves its growing customer base with fully integrated drug discovery services from target validation through to preclinical candidate selection. The company has a relentless focus on quality and continually looks to improve on its ability to deliver novel therapeutics to the clinic.

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.”

"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. 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."