Leveraging world’s largest chemistry dataset, AI drug discovery company has age-related diseases in its sights via Calico collaboration.
Los Angeles-based biotech Terray Therapeutics has secured $120 million in Series B funding to advance its generative AI-driven pipeline of small molecule therapeutics toward clinical trials and expand the capabilities of its AI platform. Combining computation with massive-scale data the company aims to leverage AI-driven exploration of molecules and therapeutic targets to address a range of complex conditions, including age-related diseases.
Terray has developed a unique dataset, generated from the quantitative measurement of more than five billion target-ligand interactions over the past three years. The company claims its dataset, which is doubling annually, is already “the world’s largest chemistry dataset” at around 50 times the amount of all chemistry data currently available publicly.
“Knowledge of what causes human disease has exploded in the ‘omics’ era, but the ability to discover and develop new molecules to treat those diseases hasn’t kept pace,” said Dr Jacob Berlin, co-founder and CEO of Terray, which claims its integration of AI and wet lab experimentation has shortened the design-make-test-analyze cycle to less than a month per target.
“Trained on rapidly iterating, precise data generated at unprecedented scale in our labs, Terray’s AI will dramatically improve the success rate of small molecule development and bring relief to patients.”
While Terray’s internal focus on immunological diseases, the company has also formed a collaboration with longevity biotech Calico that aims to leverage its AI platform to identify small molecule leads against age-related disease targets. As part of the collaboration, Calico will handle the development and commercialization of the discoveries, with Terray eligible for milestone payments and royalties on future sales.
“Terray’s platform offers a new opportunity to more precisely assess the biochemical dynamics between disease targets and small molecules at a very large scale,” said Calico’s Jonathan W Lewis, when the partnership was first announced in 2022.
The recent funding, which brings the total raised by Terray to more $200 million since its inception, was led by Bedford Ridge Capital and NVentures, the venture arm of electronics giant NVIDIA.
“Terray’s unique, high-quality data generation enables continuous advanced generative AI development, like their COATI models,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. “Rapid experiments combined with advanced AI creates a molecule discovery and design flywheel able to take on the most difficult and yet to be discovered targets.”
