OutSee awarded Innovate UK grant for agentic AI pilot study to enhance drug target validation

by · News-Medical

Jointly funded by Innovate UK and Empirical Ventures, the £50,000 grant and matching investment will enable OutSee to bolster Nomaly's target identification capabilities by removing the bottleneck of target validation, which is currently carried out manually by OutSee's scientific team. The agentic AI sub-system would provide an initial assessment of Nomaly outputs, enhancing the Company's validation pipeline and streamlining the identification and progression of novel targets with the best case for therapeutic development.

Nomaly, OutSee's core predictive genomics platform, harnesses an AI-driven biological engine to uncover valuable new therapeutic targets, and can be applied to small or previously analyzed datasets to identify targets that are undetectable via other approaches. In addition to partnering with leading biotechnology and pharma companies, OutSee operates an extensive in-house target discovery pipeline currently focused on neurology, rare, and metabolic diseases - including a Longitude Prize on ALS-funded project to identify novel targets to treat ALS disease. The Company also has an ongoing partnership with o2h Discovery to initiate a drug discovery program using OutSee's lead target asset.

Dr Julian Gough, CEO and Founder, OutSeeThis pilot is a valuable opportunity to expand on Nomaly's core capabilities. By building agentic AI into our validation pipeline, we will maximise the impact of our exceptional target discovery scientists and accelerate discovery of high-quality novel targets. We'd like to thank Innovate UK, and our investors Empirical Ventures, for their support in this project, and look forward to sharing positive results from the study."

Dan Bolser, Principal Bioinformatician, OutSee, said: "With a tailored agentic AI sub-system in place, we'll be able to quickly scale up our validation pipeline, removing a key bottleneck by automatically triaging Nomaly's high-volume output. This in turn will allow our scientific team to focus more attention on validating novel drug targets, where their expertise has the greatest impact."

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OutSee