Nuclera and DeepMirror win Innovate UK grant to revolutionise drug discovery

Nuclera has been awarded a Biomedical Catalyst Grant worth around £270k from Innovate UK with AI partner DeepMirror to progress the initiative.

The work will combine Nuclera’s rapid protein prototyping capability with DeepMirror’s AI expertise. The alliance will enable a synergistic loop which would screen many different proteins in parallel and then build AI models to select small molecules with low predicted cross-reactivity to test in the next screen – rapidly converging to the most promising small molecule leads.

The grant finance enables Nuclera to perform AI-enabled drug discovery using the eProtein Discovery™ system and DNA-encoded libraries with the aim of revolutionising the early drug discovery phases for difficult-to-express proteins. 

This would dramatically accelerate the development of new medicines against debilitating diseases such as cancer – having huge benefits for human health and the UK economy.

DeepMirror’s intuitive AI software helps researchers in optimising molecules and (bio-)processes by suggesting creative and optimal solutions, dramatically reducing the number of necessary experiments by up to 100x.

Nuclera’s eProtein Discovery™ system enables rapid optimisation and expression of difficult to express drug targets. The benchtop system miniaturises the typical protein expression process, allowing scientists to automate construct screening to inform off-platform protein scale-up, delivering reliable proteins in-hand (µg-mg amounts) in less than 48 hours.

Recently, DNA-encoded small molecule libraries (DELs) have attracted attention due to their ability to enable the screening of trillions of potential drugs in just one simple experiment. 

But while they would be ideal for discovering new drugs, using DELs successfully is challenging as they typically generate many potential drug candidates with no easy way of developing them into a drug safe for human treatment.

DeepMirror’s AI will assist in this by firstly identifying patterns in these large datasets and secondly by making use of the huge amount of information to generate models that can predict affinity to a target using libraries that do contain drug-like molecules.

The focus of drug targets in this grant will be protein kinases, which are involved in almost all bodily functions, as changes in their activity can give rise to cancer and other diseases.

But developing drugs against kinases has proved to be difficult, meaning only a few drugs which target them exist. Working alongside AI models, the eProtein Discovery™ system will work to combat this challenge as it enables the miniaturisation and parallelisation of protein synthesis and drug screening, enabling teams to test and screen multiple cross-reactive kinases in parallel.

While the focus of the grant work will be on protein kinases, due to their difficulty to obtain and their importance to human health, the eProtein Discovery™ system has the capacity to explore a wide array of protein targets beyond protein kinases.

Nuclera says that this adaptable technology holds promise for investigating diverse biological pathways and unlocking protein bottlenecks in biological research.

Nuclera was founded in 2013 by PhD students at the University of Cambridge – Michael Chen, Jiahao Huang and Gordon Herling-McInroy. When working on their dissertations they identified protein inaccessibility as the number one obstacle and a key bottleneck in biology.

They set out to solve protein inaccessibility in an effort to better human health. This drive feeds into the company's vision to deliver the first thought-to-protein prototyping system that reduces the timelines and hurdles to acquire target proteins in drug discovery programs.

London-based DeepMirror was founded by a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge in 2019; it recognised early that while many spoke of AI's potential to accelerate discovery, real-world examples were sparse. From the outset, its guiding principle has been to demystify complex AI, rendering it both accessible and invaluable to scientists across the spectrum.

DeepMirror collaborates with intimate academic teams and partners global biopharma giants. As a pioneer at the crossroads of biology, physics and machine learning, the business says it is backed by a network of forward-thinking investors.