PostEra is building a one-stop-shop for medicinal chemistry to serve the world's drug hunters.
We need your help to build best-in-class cloud tools for biotechs and medicinal chemists. You will build the world’s most comprehensive molecule search and ordering platform, serve state-of-the-art ML models at scale, and work with domain experts in drug discovery to help design the tools they need. Your favorite tool is whichever one helps the world cure more diseases faster, full stop.
See how we've been using some of our tools to find a COVID antiviral cure through crowd-sourcing: https://postera.ai/covid
This looks very similar to our Moonshot open-science initiative and we love the idea of using crowdsourcing when such diseases lack commercial funding. If you know the folks who are organising this we'd be very happy to discuss with them.
If the article is correct, high costs for building and maintaining the "Amazon for chemicals" were the primary cause of failure.
Many great ideas are a matter of when, not if. Knowing when to launch is as critical for entrepreneurs as is knowing when to buy for investors.
A modern Chemdex might thrive like the modern Webvan (ie Instacart) because if costs were the cause of death, a cloud infrastructure would address this issue.
Obviously, this is a very different model from the ARM model.
Hopefully one of these comparisons can offer helpful insights.
Yes, certainly an interesting idea. For now our models are trained on large corpora of organic chemistry reactions so our tech has some way to go before extrapolating outside this space.
Ah yes, industrializing the Chemistry part of drug discovery is certainly a blue sky dream but a field nonetheless we try to stay updated on -- hardware to do automated synthesis continues to make incremental improvements.
As a company we certainly work hard to ensure our technology is used for approved drug development. We have internal alerts as a company as to the risk of compounds being entered into our system and certainly suppliers and chemical manufacturers have high regulatory oversight. But yes there is always such an unfortunate risk but something we do spend time thinking about.
Maybe I should have phrased my question differently - your startup being exploited by a large group of people with disposable cash and unmet demands is one of the best possible outcomes.
What is an "approved" drug development? Who gets to decide, when the substances are not restricted or scheduled? This means making them is not illegal. So I fail to see how it is an "unfortunate risk", except a risk of making money- which would be fortunate :)
You are missing opportunities just due to your specific moral stance. Drop-shipping is an excellent way to have new customer acquisition pipelines without having to pay for them.
This could be my misunderstanding of the definition of "designer drugs" but I interpreted this as substances which mimic controlled substances but don't trigger drug classification or testing. Assuming this definition then this is something we wouldn't feel comfortable supporting regardless of the cash or demand. My understanding is that these substances are not tested in animal and human trials or approved by governing bodies like the FDA which are critical for the safety and efficacy of use.
Though please do correct me if I'm missing the use case you are referring to.
No correction needed, it is mostly correct - however, a lot of these substances have been tested and do not even mimic controlled substances: MK667 is a good example.
I think you may be throwing the baby with the bathwater, as designing and improving designer drugs is an untapped market with far more potential upsides than downsides.
Certainly we can appreciate that better designs are important though we chose to focus on synthesis as there is an oversupply of algorithms in literature/industry that can suggest designs ideas (we published a few of our own) while the synthesis space was less explored and we think provides the biggest leverage point to speed up cycle times.
Ultimately when partnering with drug hunters, outside of our cloud-based platform, we offer the integration of molecular design with chemical synthesis as we believe computational approaches are at their most useful when these two aspects are coupled.
PostEra (YC W20) | Full Stack Web Developer | REMOTE or Bay Area | Full-time | https://postera.ai/
PostEra (YC W20) | Backend Engineer | REMOTE or Bay Area | Full-time | https://postera.ai/
PostEra is building a one-stop-shop for medicinal chemistry to help drug hunters get cures to patients faster. We need your help to build best-in-class cloud tools for biotechs and medicinal chemists. You will build the world’s most comprehensive molecule search and ordering platform, serve state-of-the-art ML models at scale, and work with domain experts in drug discovery to help design the tools they need. Your favorite tool is whichever one helps the world cure more diseases faster, full stop.
1. We ensure that the compound is pure using analytical methods like NMR and LC/MS. In our Moonshot project, the assay cascade comprises biochemical assays against the main protease (2 different assay methodologies, run in Oxford and Weizmann Institute) and live virus assays, thus we should be able to infer whether the activity is caused by impurities killing the virus. In addition, we also perform high-throughput x-ray crystallography to determine the structures of all the protein-ligand complexes, which serves an an orthogonal assay.
2. Yes, our algorithm does factor in the yield when it decides which reaction to use.
3. You're absolutely right. It is very ambitious but we've realized that even if we don't get our compounds into human trials (currently aiming for in-vivo testing in next few weeks) that we will still have generated a lot of useful data that is there in the open for when the next pandemic comes around. This has been a real weakness from prior pandemic where research wasn't continued and certainly wasn't stored in clean accessible ways. As I'm sure you know SARS has super high genetic similarity to current COV-2 so having prior data accessible and cleaned would have given researchers a real head start.
4. Yes Derek is aware of COVID Moonshot and is also of the opinion that is it both ambitious but sadly necessary. We continue to follow his posts as healthy skepticism particularly in the area of AI for drug discovery is always helpful.
It didn't come across in my post in retrospect, but just want to say clearly I love this idea and the ambitious nature of it. I think when someone works in drug discovery, it's hard to escape this feeling that there has to be a better, faster, cheaper way. But at the same time, the reality of seeing how little we actually understand about biological systems on display each and every day tends to be quite a downer! The world sorely needs more of this kind of thinking.
Full Job Spec: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/13332
PostEra is building a one-stop-shop for medicinal chemistry to serve the world's drug hunters.
We need your help to build best-in-class cloud tools for biotechs and medicinal chemists. You will build the world’s most comprehensive molecule search and ordering platform, serve state-of-the-art ML models at scale, and work with domain experts in drug discovery to help design the tools they need. Your favorite tool is whichever one helps the world cure more diseases faster, full stop.
See how we've been using some of our tools to find a COVID antiviral cure through crowd-sourcing: https://postera.ai/covid