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When Terray Therapeutics launched in 2022, brothers Jacob and Eli Berlin told C&EN that the firm was mapping the interactions between small molecules and drug targets. Since then, it has built a set of over 5 billion target-ligand interaction data points. Now the firm has raised $120 million in series B funding to turn the data into molecules that are ready for the clinic. The Berlins expect the first compound to get there by 2026.
“We always talk about the fact that our platform is an intersection of experimentation and computation and AI and data generation,” says CEO Jacob Berlin, the chemist who set the company up on the basis of hardware from his nanotechnology-based research at City of Hope, a California hospital and research center.
The brothers say Terray chemists have used microarrays of molecules to create the world’s largest dataset—50 times as large as all publicly available chemistry data. The chemists continue to build and improve on it through experimentation. “We can make several million molecules per month to test and refine each of our AI models,” Jacob Berlin explains. “And so that’s really allowed us to move our pipeline.”
That pipeline includes molecules that advance the company’s own focus—immunology—as well as work for partners Calico and Bristol Myers Squibb. The company’s researchers described their algorithm for modeling drug-like chemical space in February (J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2024, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.3c01753). A subsequent preprint, published before peer review, describes how a variation on that algorithm uses latent diffusion models to generate new small molecules (bioRxiv 2024, DOI: 10.1101/2024.08.22.609169).
But Eli Berlin, Terray’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, says the company is not about just artificial intelligence but also wet-lab chemistry follow-up. It is that combination, he says, that interests investors.
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