Glasgow university spinout raises $43mn to ‘digitise chemistry’

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A spinout from Glasgow university has raised $43mn to “digitise chemistry”, using a computing process that runs continuously from designing new molecules with artificial intelligence to making them in an automated lab.

Chemify was spun out in March 2022 by Professor Lee Cronin and colleagues in Glasgow’s Digital Chemistry Laboratory. The funding includes $34mn from venture investors led by Triatomic Capital in the US, as well as $9mn from the UK government’s Innovation Accelerators programme.

“We can design, discover and make complex molecules on demand more quickly and efficiently than ever before, using digital blueprints,” said Cronin, Chemify’s chief executive.

Computerised chemical design is now well established, as AI drug discovery makes rapid progress in the pharmaceutical industry. What makes Chemify stand out, according to Cronin, is the way its “chemputer” technology extends to manufacturing the newly invented molecules.

“A lot of people are using AI to dream up new molecules that turn out to be hard or impossible to make,” he said. “The bottleneck is in the lab. We only select the dream molecules that can be actually manufactured efficiently. We make the AI work.”

“What we’ve been missing in chemistry is a global standard, a universal language for chemical procedures,” said Stephen Hilton, associate professor at UCL School of Pharmacy in London, who is not involved in Chemify but is looking to use its technology in his lab.

“I think the technology and equipment [Cronin] has developed could be applied to digitise the whole of chemistry,” Hilton added. “He was the first person really to pick up on that need.”

Another vote of confidence for Cronin came from Fraser Stoddart, Nobel laureate and professor of chemistry at Northwestern University in Chicago, who is not involved in the company.

“As someone who is both an out of the box thinker and an accomplished doer, he is a very rare scientist in the chemical community,” Stoddart said. “I see Chemify as a major development for the field of chemistry.”

Cronin said the chemputer, using lab robotics, could make chemicals in quantities ranging from milligrams to hundreds of grammes, including complex molecules that require as many as 15 steps to synthesise. It has already made several medicinal compounds, as well as advanced materials for other applications.

GSK, the UK-based pharmaceutical group, has tested a prototype chemputer from Cronin’s lab. “Interest in the pharma industry is extremely high,” he said. “We expect to be announcing partnerships soon.”

Cronin is one of chemistry’s more imaginative and colourful figures. Another of his research interests is investigating the process by which simple molecules started to assemble into the first living organisms.

“My dream is to turn Chemify into a $10bn company and then build an institute to discover the origin of life,” he said.