Almirall and Iktos announce research collaboration in Artificial Intelligence for new drug design

Almirall, S.A. (ALM), a leading skin-health focused global pharmaceutical company, and Iktos, a company specialized in Artificial Intelligence for novel drug design, today announced a collaboration agreement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) , where Iktos generative modelling AI technology will be used to design novel optimized compounds, to speed up the identification of promising drug candidates for an undisclosed Almirall drug discovery program(s).

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 the desirable characteristics of a novel drug candidate. This tackles one of the key challenges in drug design: rapid and iterative identification of molecules which simultaneously validate multiple bioactive attributes and drug-like criteria for clinical testing.

“This partnership is an example of how we intend to explore the enormous possibilities offered by technology to find new molecules and to speed up clinical development”, said Dr. Bhushan Hardas, Executive Vice President R&D, Chief Scientific Officer of Almirall. “The health sector lags behind others in the digital world. Almirall wants to be at the forefront of innovation to develop holistic and transversal approaches. Artificial Intelligence will provide Almirall a unique opportunity to combine our proficiency with the preciseness and agility to truly make a difference in patients' lives”, he concluded.

“We are thrilled to initiate a new research collaboration with Almirall” commented Yann Gaston-Mathé, President and CEO of Iktos. “This new collaboration is further testimony to the leadership position that Iktos has developed in the field of AI for de novo drug design, in little more than two years of existence. We are eager to demonstrate to our collaborators the power of Iktos technology to accelerate their research, and to get the opportunity to further improve by confronting our approach to a new use case, consistently with our strategy to prove our value in real-life projects”.

Iktos has recently announced several collaborations with biopharmaceutical companies where Iktos AI technology is used to accelerate the design of promising compounds, and has published, at the EFMC 2018 meeting, an experimental validation of the technology in a real-life drug discovery project. Iktos generative modelling SaaS software, Makya™, is now available on the market, and Iktos intends to release its retro-synthesis SaaS platform Spaya™ as a beta version, before the end of 2019.

About Iktos

Incorporated in October 2016, Iktos is a French start-up company specialized in the development of artificial intelligence solutions applied to chemical research, more specifically medicinal chemistry and new drug design. Iktos is developing a proprietary and innovative solution based on deep learning generative models, which enables, using existing data, to design molecules that are optimized in silico to meet all the success criteria of a small molecule discovery project. The use of Iktos technology enables major productivity gains in upstream pharmaceutical R&D. Iktos offers its technology both as professional services and as a SaaS software platform, Makya™.

For more information, please visitiktos.ai