PentaBind
PentaBind is an AI drug development company that uses Artificial Intelligence to design aptamer-based drugs. Aptamers are a foundational binding molecule technology used within therapeutics, diagnostics and manufacturing.
After decades of research, pharma companies have been able to treat only 15% of the human proteome mostly with small molecule drugs (which represent 90% of drugs on the market). Many proteins are therefore labeled ‘undruggable’, because small molecules can’t treat them. There is a need for advanced therapies to tackle the unmet needs in treating oncologic, neurologic and other diseases.
PentaBind’s proprietary AI-based platform designs new aptamer drugs that can target ‘undruggable’ proteins. They apply a powerful Generative AI approach to enable the design of aptamers (short, single-stranded DNA or RNA sequences) with ‘drug-like qualities’, balancing multiple features including binding, specificity, stability and others. PentaBind’s unique competitive advantage lies in their data generation methods, which produce unique, high quality data, now the largest of its kind. Traditional wet-lab aptamer design only optimizes for binding, and only searches 1 billionth of the astronomically large sequence space and so, for the past 20 years, aptamers have been mostly limited to academia.
Founders
Rory Ryan
CEO
Rory is a third time founder. He cofounded ZiO Health, which he sold after leading it on product and operations for six years. With eight years of aptamer industry experience, he has first-hand customer experience of aptamer wet-labs. He graduated from the University of Leeds with a First Class in Engineering and a Distinction Master’s at Imperial College Business School.
Phil Haynes
CTO
Phil has five years of drug discovery experience in aptamers and cancer therapeutic, and holds a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from UCL and Imperial College. He has worked with multiple research institutes and pharma companies, including AstraZeneca. He holds a First Class degree in Physics from the University of Exeter.
Miguel Gonzalez
Miguel Gonzalez has eight years experience in data science and high performance computing. He is an expert in evolutionary biology, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has worked for the prestigious Faculty.ai. He holds a PhD in Complex Systems Simulation from the University of Southampton.
Milestones
Founded at Entrepreneur First
Invented 5x proprietary wet-lab methods to generate unique, high quality AI training data
Built the largest aptamer/protein dataset of its kind to train AI
Seed (£600,000)