Ligand Pro

Ligand Pro is a project that is developing in the field of ligand research using artificial intelligence.

History

2023: Attracting at least half a billion rubles of investment from Postgres Professional

Russian developer DBMS Postgres Professional supported financial Ligand Pro, which specializes in the development of drugs with use. artificial intelligence For the year, Ligand Pro received 100 million rubles investments from Postgres Professional. In the next three years, the company plans to invest at least half a billion rubles in the project. Postgres Professional representatives announced this Zdrav.Expert on August 10, 2023.

Postgres Professional will invest half a billion rubles in a drug development startup using AI

The traditional way of developing drugs takes up to ten years and costs pharmaceutical companies, according to Deloitte, an average of $2.3 billion. One of the key stages of development is the search and testing of ligands - molecules that, by binding to the desired biomolecule, have a therapeutic effect. The selection involves 8,000-10,000 candidate drugs and only 5-10 of them fall into the clinical trial stage. Sometimes none of the drugs ever get into production, having been rejected at the last stage due to toxicity and an unacceptable safety profile for human health. Searching and testing takes an average of 3 to 6 years and eats up to 50% of the budget of pharmaceutical companies.

Ligand Pro is developing in the field of ligand research with AI. The concept of Ligand Pro, according to the creators, is based on an approach that was not previously used, the details of which the company did not disclose.

In general, the Ligand Pro approach is designed to reduce the time and resources spent on the computational stage of development in multiples. The main feature of the platform being created, as specified in the company, is the use of advanced artificial intelligence methods designed to minimize the need for source data from a drug developer. The Ligand Pro solution is able not only to find ligands from databases of known molecules, but also to generate chemical structures of new ligands, including those previously unknown to humanity, thus opening up new prospects for the development of chemical space.

Potential customers of the startup solution are pharmaceutical companies that will be able to optimize their resources for drug development. The completion of the development of the first elements of the Ligand Pro platform is expected in two years. A full-fledged launch of the solution is planned by 2027.

According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, as of August 2023, there are 9 people on the list of founders of Ligand Pro. Among them is the management of Postgres Professional, including, Oleg Bartunov which became one of the ideological inspirations of the project. Professor of artificial intelligence Ivan Oseledets supported the idea and invited experienced colleagues to Ligand Pro Skoltech specializing in artificial intelligence and. to bioinformatics Together, the scientists developed a concept that formed the basis of the platform.

A team of 7 professors, researchers and graduate students in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence are working on the project. Dmitry Ivankov, Ivan Oseledets, Alexander Shapeev and Marina Pak, who are also among the co-founders of the project, play a key role in the development of the project. The company plans to expand the team with experts in chemoinformatics, molecular modeling and artificial intelligence. The selection of specialists in this area is reported on the project website.