Exscientia

Formed in 2012, Exscientia were the first to automate drug design and the first company to have AI designed molecules entering clinical trials. To date three Exscientia AI designed molecules are being assess in a clinical setting. The company's founder and CEO is Prof Andrew Hopkins, Honorary Professor at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee where previously he held the Chair of Medicinal Informatics and the SULSA Research Professorship of Translational Biology.

Exscientia’s mission is to make safer, more sophisticated drugs available to all - more quickly and efficiently using AI drug discovery platforms. Exscientia generates their own data and combines the analytical power of AI with the creativity and expertise of their world-class scientists. This allows them to shorten the pre-clinical drug discovery stage and in turn, substantially accelerate the path to clinical testing, with the prospect of delivery of new treatments to patients worldwide.

Exscientia has grown into a market leader in AI-driven drug design. In Spring 2021, the company announced a $225 million Series D round that also provided another $300 million in an equity commitment from SoftBank. The company also announced in 2021 the acquisition of personalised medicine AI pioneer Allcyte. This will allow Exscientia to expand its translational capabilities by enabling high content evaluation of individual patient biology in primary tumour tissues, rather than artificial cell lines or animal models.

Partnerships with global pharma companies including Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Bayer, Celgene and Sanofi have delivered strong commercial validation and allowed Exscientia to engage in projects across multiple therapeutic areas. These include inflammation, cancer, infectious disease, COVID-19, and psychiatric disease. Exscientia’s AI platform has now designed three drugs that are in Phase 1 human clinical trials including the company’s own A2a receptor antagonist for immuno-oncology.

The company has won numerous prizes for the founder and the business including the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation, recognizing its pioneering work in the field of AI-driven drug discovery. In 2021, Exscientia was named the number 1 fastest growing pharma/biotech in the UK in the Alantra Pharma Fast 50.

Exscientia continue to go from strength to strength. Announcements of new investments and partnerships plus the progression of drug candidates show that they have much more to contribute.

Follow their progress on twitter @ExscientiaAI or web https://www.exscientia.ai/