Leash Biosciences Announces $9.3 Million Seed Financing to Pioneer AI-Driven Medicinal Chemistry
Summary
The oversubscribed round was led by Springtide Ventures with participation from MetaPlanet, Top Harvest Capital, Mitsui Global Investment, MFV Partners, Recursion CEO and co-founder Chris Gibson, and Recursion co-founder Blake Borgeson.Leash aims to develop a foundational and generalizable machine learning model of medicinal chemistry that can accurately predict small molecule drug candidates for any protein in silico, and more broadly, interactions between any protein and any chemical. The team also brings experience from Eikon Therapeutics, Myriad Genetics, insitro Biosciences, LinkedIn, Stripe, and other leading technology and biotechnology players.In parallel, Leash announced the launch of its inaugural machine learning Kaggle competition, the Big Encoded Library for Chemical Assessment (BELKA). Leveraging a dataset of unprecedented scale, BELKA sets out to address one of the most critical challenges in drug discovery: predicting the likelihood of chemical materials binding to pharmaceutically-relevant targets. "By providing participants with access to such a comprehensive dataset, we are empowering the global scientific community to develop innovative solutions that could revolutionize the way we identify potential drug candidates, said Ian Quigley, Leash Bio CEO.About the Kaggle Competition: Predict New Medicines with BELKA (Big Encoded Library for Chemical Assessment)BELKA aims to contribute to groundbreaking advancements in predictive modeling for pharmaceutical research by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning. For more information, including participation criteria and registration, visit the competition page on .About LeashLeash Biosciences is a biotechnology company unleashing machine learning to solve medicinal chemistry, with headquarters in Salt Lake City, UT.