Glasgow-based chemistry tech startup Chemify has secured a further £1.2 million in funding from the Gates Foundation to advance its AI-powered drug discovery programme targeting tuberculosis, strengthening its mission to accelerate the development of new small-molecule treatments for one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.
Chemify is a deep-tech pioneer fusing chemistry, robotics, computation, and Chemputation – Chemify’s purpose-built AI to digitise molecule creation.
Building on a successful collaboration with Lgenia, the expanded project will leverage Chemify’s automated platform to design and synthesize new drug leads addressing one of the world’s most urgent infectious diseases.
This next phase builds on Chemify’s earlier Gates Foundation-funded collaboration, bringing the total funding to £2.4 million and successfully demonstrating the application of digital chemistry to accelerate small-molecule discovery.
Insights from that initiative helped refine Chemify’s Chemputation workflows for compound design, chemical reaction planning and validation, strengthening the company’s ability to deliver high-quality candidates efficiently and at scale for therapeutic and disease applications.
“We’re honoured that yet another collaborator has decided to renew their partnership with Chemify. Continued support from the Gates Foundation enables us to build on our work with Lgenia and push the boundaries of digital chemistry for global health to address tuberculosis,” said Lee Cronin, CEO and Founder, Chemify.
“Chemputation lets us design small molecules directly from code which our AI-enabled digital chemistry platform ensures is makeable, turning chemistry into a programmable science where Chemify’s systems can create new therapeutics rapidly and reproducibly.”
Chemify’s Chemputation platform merges extensible programming language, advanced robotics and the ‘world’s largest curated library of validated reactions’, which empowers partners to move seamlessly from concept to compound.
Chemify’s platform combines structure-activity relationship (SAR) exploration with data-driven molecular design, allowing collaborators to rapidly generate optimised compounds with strong potency and drug-like properties.
The closed-loop workflow accelerates iteration and enhances design confidence to achieve high-quality hits and leads with exceptional speed and precision.
Under the expanded collaboration, Lgenia and Chemify will define strategies for the design and optimisation of new molecules. Chemify will then design and synthesise potential hits and leads through its Chemputation full digital chemistry workflow.
Lgenia will orchestrate compound testing in enzyme and whole-cell assays. Together, the teams will identify and validate compounds against high-priority TB targets, advancing the most promising candidates toward hit-to-lead development.