AMPLY Discovery is powering the discovery of new cures for complex diseases, such as cancer, metabolic diseases, and infectious diseases, through AI and synthetic biology – making the discovery of new medicines more predictable and less expensive. AMPLY’s platform – the AMPLYfolioAI – is a unique drug discovery engine which works a little like ChatGPT, but for drug target and molecule discovery: amino acids and oligonucleotides are its building blocks. AMPLY are using machine learning and predicative analytics techniques to mine vast genomic datasets, which are generated using next-generation sequencing technology, and synthetic biology techniques are used to synthesize and validate our in silico predictions in a real-world in vitro setting.
AMPLYfolioAI was developed through a decade of research by Dr Ben Thomas, starting with his PhD work and concluding with his post-doctoral work at Queen’s University Belfast. Ben met Dermot Tierney who was working in the TTO at Queen’s, and they agreed to spin the company out together. AMPLY was incorporated with the aim of leveraging the power of the platform to establish a drug discovery studio, a company which focuses upon developing and out-licensing new R&D programmes to discover and validate novel biologic drugs. The aim of the approach is to be quick and efficient, generating new molecules from data and taking these molecules through to candidate selection and then partnering on these assets with downstream biopharma licensees at an early stage.
Ben is the dual CEO and CTO. The platform was his idea and based on over a decade of his academic research endeavours. Ben came from a background in the financial markets and the original seed of an idea was based on whether he could apply some of the stock market prediction techniques he had seen deployed in finance to the area of computational biology, to treat drug discovery like picking a stock. It turned out he could!
Dermot explains: “I am the COO and handle anything non-technical. After completing an MBA I moved from working in industry to working in university technology transfer, all with the idea of finding a start up idea. Eventually I moved to Queen’s with a specific eye on the interface of software and health. The opportunity to work with Ben and spin out Amply felt like the right technology and team fit at the right time.”
AMPLY is based in Belfast, although some of the team are based out of London in a university lab that AMPLY collaborate with. “Put simply… NI is home,” said Dermot.
The company is a spin out from Queen’s, Qubis Limited and Clarendon Co-Fund who are some of the early investors, creating an enduring link to Northern Ireland.
“Drug discovery is still a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. While the unpredictability of traditional drug development has been replaced, to some degree, by the more predictable approach offered by rational drug design unprecedented cost and complexity have been added to the process. Rational drug design has largely stepped away from the traditional natural approach to drug discovery, but in doing so has left a huge amount of untapped value on the table. While over fifty percent of the drugs we still use today are a product of traditional drug discovery we have only tapped into a fraction of what our greatest laboratory – Nature – can produce. What if we could leverage state of the art approaches in AI and synthetic biology to re-invent traditional drug discovery, reducing or eliminating some of the common problems such as: High failure rates during clinical trials, time-consuming extraction, characterization and validation, cost intensive lab processes, and limited understanding of the complex biological systems and disease mechanisms?
“AMPLY can solve these issues, by leveraging what already exists in nature (but is yet unknown) and make predictions based on molecular function regardless of structure or sequence (we are not simply moving in concentric circles finding ever smaller molecular versions of a “Russian Doll”). AMPLYfolioAI predicts molecule function, identifies new genetic targets, synthetically producing relevant modalities which are feasible for bio-printing (biologic molecules such as proteins, peptides, and RNA). These types of biologic molecule are potent effector molecules but are also inherently suited to our AI-driven approach which relies heavily on being able to quickly and cheaply produce in vitro training data – this means that AMPLY is focused on diseases where these modalities can maximize the treatment opportunity.
“We are running our own internal discovery programmes, to develop new therapeutics which we will out-license when further down the development pathway.
“AMPLY is due shortly to announce that we have raised a further $1.48m in seed equity funding to develop new drug products using our proprietary AI-driven drug discovery platform. This takes our total pre-seed and seed funding to around $4m, and we are deploying this across our RNAi discovery programme working on oncology) and our nebulised-AMP programme (for MDR lung infections). We expect to raise even more and complete a further tranche of funding into this round within the next few months.”
AMPLY has raised this funding to support development of its programmes through the pre-clinical stage. The round was led by Twin Path Ventures, a London-based pan-European investment fund which specialises in AI-centred businesses, with support from US-based fund Venture Science, and follow-on investment from Co-fund NI, which is managed by Clarendon Fund Managers and supported by Invest NI and the British Business Bank, and QUBIS Limited,” said Dermot.
