For­mer Deep­Mind in­tern launch­es Atom­ic AI to 'parse' RNA struc­ture for new small mol­e­cules

An­oth­er ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence start­up has en­tered the drug dis­cov­ery field, this time on a mis­sion to fu­el new RNA small mol­e­cules.

Atom­ic AI re­vealed a $35 mil­lion Se­ries A Wednes­day morn­ing to boost its com­pu­ta­tion­al and wet lab work. The 14-em­ploy­ee start­up will use the pro­ceeds to con­tin­ue build­ing out its so-called PARSE plat­form, which is fo­cused on pre­dict­ing the 3D struc­ture of RNA.

“There are a num­ber of RNA tran­scripts of in­ter­est that we want to drug with small mol­e­cules, specif­i­cal­ly, and a ma­jor is­sue across the field is that it is hard to get se­lec­tive func­tion­al small mol­e­cule binders to those tran­scripts,” CEO and founder Raphael Town­shend told End­points News in a pre­view. “And of­ten­times, the mech­a­nism of ac­tion is de­creas­ing the amount of pro­tein be­ing ex­pressed.”

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