Arctoris, Molecule to tackle the innovation crisis in drug discovery and development

Arctoris Ltd has announced a formal partnership with Molecule in order to tackle the ongoing innovation crisis faced by drug discovery and development across both industry and academia. Through its fully automated drug discovery platform, Arctoris enables researchers and biotechnological entrepreneurs to design and remotely execute advanced cell-based, molecular biology and biochemical assays. Together with Molecule’s distributed IP ownership platform, which enables stakeholders in drug development to collaborate and share ownership of the IP they are working to develop, Arctoris and Molecule are positioned to take critical strides towards making drug discovery and development faster, cheaper, less risk-prone, and more viable at all levels.

“Drug discovery researchers worldwide face enormous challenges posed by a widespread lack of reproducibility and the limited availability of standardised, structured, high quality data. By partnering with Molecule, we intend to make drug discovery and development more democratic, collaborative, and efficient in the interest of bringing higher-quality therapeutics to patients faster through the combination of robotics, AI and a distributed research platform,” said Martin-Immanuel Bittner, MD DPhil, Co-Founder and CEO of Arctoris.

Arctoris has designed and built a fully automated research facility based in Oxford (UK), where robotics perform a range of the most frequent drug discovery assays for researchers worldwide. The company offers a complete system to generate, analyse and visualize research data in a secure cloud environment, leveraging the benefits of robotic experimentation, and providing full transparency, precision, and consistency in preclinical R&D. Using the Arctoris platform, researchers worldwide can enjoy accelerated progress in their research, making discoveries faster, cheaper and more efficiently, whilst being liberated from manual work.

“At Molecule, we aim to create an open source ecosystem for collaborative drug development thereby distributing the cost, risk and ownership of drug development by offering fractional ownership in pharmaceutical IP in exchange for preclinical or clinical development work, as well as funding. Through this partnership with Arctoris, our joint aim is to accelerate innovation and advances in drug discovery and development, more rapidly bringing drugs to market and enhancing patient therapies,” said Tyler Golato, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist at Molecule.

Today’s pharmaceutical industry faces a wide variety of challenges, with the most pressing being the ongoing innovation crisis. Drug discovery rates are declining, the price of bringing a drug to market is increasing, and ROI on R&D is expected to hit 0% in the next few years. These factors combine to directly impact on the number and types of therapeutics being brought to market. Further compounding these problems, both industry and academia struggle with a widespread lack of reproducibility.

Joining forces, Arctoris and Molecule will combine their technologies to create a modular pipeline for distributed therapeutics development in the longevity space and adjacent fields – a pipeline in which they will involve universities, patient advocacy groups, pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies, as well as investors. Shares in intellectual property or direct funding will be provided to stakeholders that participate in the development of therapeutics.