Boston-based Dotmatics helping scientists make better drugs in less time using AI

BOSTON – Getting a new drug to market in the U.S. has perhaps never been more difficult.

“It’s a really long process,” says Kalim Saliba, of Boston-based Dotmatics. “It’s on average 10 years and costs $2.5 billion.”

Artificial intelligence could change that — with the help of Dotmatics.

“Dotmatics is a scientific R&D software company,” says Saliba. “We work with our customers to connect science data and decision-making to help them get to an AI-assisted future.”

In other words, Dotmatics is helping scientists make better drugs – faster — by allowing them to aggregate their research into one platform, and then apply AI over the top.

“What tools like generative AI do is they learn from data, they discover patterns and they help to predict what to do next,” says Stephen Tharp of Dotmatics. “And we’re trying to make that sort of like a flashlight for scientists. They can go scan a tremendous amount of data, and AI will help them focus on an area they should go look at.”

Perhaps the most promising future use is in a field of medicine called biologics – largely using proteins to attack certain diseases. And AI can be instrumental in that mission.

“These models will be able to generate the protein structures that it thinks — and that, by the way humans, may have never seen — that could potentially address this illness,” says Saliba.

That process could one day offer solutions for intractable diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer.

“Right now we have maybe 15-20 drugs on the market that are helped discover by AI,” says Tharp. “I think in 5-10 years, we’ll be talking about drugs that were not discovered by AI.”

“It will allow us to do a tremendous amount of scientific innovation in the amount of time that we never thought was feasible.”

Learn more at Dotmatics.com.