Iktos Announces Deployment of their AI for Drug Design Software Makya™ by Chiesi Group

Iktos Announces Deployment of their AI for Drug Design

Iktos, a company that specialized in Artificial Intelligence for new drug design today announced collaboration agreement in AI for new drug design with Chiesi Group, the international research-focused pharmaceutical and healthcare. Under the agreement, Iktos’s de novo generative design software Makya™ will be used by Chiesi scientists to facilitate rapid and cost-effective design of novel compounds and accelerate hit-to-lead/lead optimisation for undisclosed Chiesi’s drug discovery programmes.

“Licensing Makya is another step Chiesi wanted to complete in digitalization of R&D and in particular in drug discovery”Tweet this

Iktos has released Makya™, a generative AI-driven de novo design software for Multi-Parametric Optimization (MPO), 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. Makya™ can also be operated as a Python package through a Jupyter notebook interface.

Iktos’ AI technology, based on deep generative models, 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. This tackles one of the key challenges in drug design: rapid identification of molecules which simultaneously satisfy multiple bioactivity and drug-like criteria for drug discovery and development.

“Licensing Makya is another step Chiesi wanted to complete in digitalization of R&D and in particular in drug discovery” said Maurizio Civelli, Head of Global Research and Pre-Clinical Development Area of Chiesi Group, “The possibility of applying cutting edge AI technology relying on our internal expertise and historical data to drug design is very appealing. We think this emerging technology will become soon part of the compound design toolkit for all medicinal chemists, to facilitate their work aimed at identifying the right molecule”.

“We are proud to work with Chiesi Farmaceutici, one of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies in the world, and to have their scientists use our software in their early discovery programs”, said Yann Gaston-Mathé, Co-founder and CEO of Iktos. “It is our ultimate goal to put our technology in the hands of drug discovery scientists, who have deep knowledge and understanding of their discovery programs. By combining their drug discovery expertise with our algorithmic and data science know-how and experience derived from the many collaborations we have established to date, we believe that the promise of AI to dramatically improve drug discovery will have a better chance to be realized and impact therapeutic development”.