A new AI startup has emerged, and Pfizer likes what it sees
Aaron Morris and Alpha Lee met years ago while studying applied mathematics at Oxford University. They eventually went their separate ways, with Morris diving into machine learning applications in finance while Lee researched how it could transform medicinal chemistry. But sometime around 2019, Morris realized Lee was onto something.
“I think we sat down together as co-founders in 2019 and said, ‘I think there’s a kind of sufficient scientific depth here to merit forming a company around it,’” said Morris, who’s now CEO of the company, PostEra.
On Tuesday, Morris, Lee and their co-founder Matt Robinson unveiled a $24 million Series A round to kick things off, as well as an expanded partnership deal with Pfizer that will bring in another $13 million upfront and up to $248 million in potential milestones.
While a whole slate of companies has emerged with promises to transform the drug discovery process using AI and machine learning — Merck signed a pair of deals with Absci just last week that could add up to $610 million in addition to royalties — PostEra thinks it has a differentiated approach.
If you crudely break down the drug discovery process — said Lee, who’s now CSO — it starts with finding a biological target, then it becomes a chemistry problem where you’re looking for safe and effective small molecules against that target, and then it becomes a medical problem where you’re running clinical trials. PostEra is focused squarely on chemistry.
“Now, within chemistry, you have this very well-understood, design-make-test cycle, which is designing molecules, making them and testing them,” Lee said. “And many of the companies in the space have addressed one or maybe two of these different components of medicinal chemistry, but PostEra is really the first company to integrate all three stages together.”
Over the last 18 months, PostEra has inked several partnerships, most notably one with Pfizer back in December 2020. It has also worked on the development of antivirals in the COVID Moonshot project, a non-profit, open-science consortium of scientists around the world with the goal of creating affordable and easily-manufactured antivirals against Covid-19.
While PostEra’s first partnership with Pfizer was focused on innovation around machine learning — as opposed to pushing drug discovery programs into the clinic — the expansion of that deal will now pave the way for the establishment of an AI Lab, where PostEra and Pfizer will work together on multiple drug discovery programs with an initial focus in oncology and Covid-19 antivirals.
The Series A funds will be used to hunt for new partnerships, expand the company’s current medicinal chemistry platform, and kick off work on the company’s own internal targets. While the team is currently 10-large, Morris expects to double it by the end of the year.
“We’re really trying to build a company here that bridges two very different cultures,” Morris said. “One of them is construed as a kind of computational engineering type approach. And then you’ve got the kind of more traditional medicinal chemists, and often the two are put in an antagonistic relationship with each other trying to prove who’s better. I think what we’re trying to build at PostEra is a new modern 21st-century biopharma company that respects both.”
