Accelerating Medicinal Chemistry with Aaron Morris from PostEra

In the traditional paradigm, it can take up to ten years for a drug to come to market. For this episode, I am joined by guest Aaron Morris, Co-founder and CEO of PostEra, to talk about using AI to accelerate medicinal chemistry and bring cures to patients faster than ever before.

Aaron breaks down the medicinal chemistry process and explains how PostEra applies machine learning to drug discovery. The data landscape within drug discovery is particularly challenging and today, we learn about PostEra’s approach to gathering data, the data sets they build from, and how they find new uses for project-specific data. Hear about the importance of model interpretability and how to get a competitive advantage as an AI-powered startup.

Key Points:

• Aaron Morris’ background in mathematics and how it led to the creation of PostEra.
• The scientific disciplines involved in developing a drug.
• PostEra’s focus: building the world’s most advanced ML platform for medicinal chemistry.
• Aaron explains the process of medicinal chemistry.
• How PostEra applies machine learning to the drug discovery process.
• The challenging data landscape within drug discovery and the data sets PostEra builds from.
• PostEra’s approach to gathering data, and how they use it.
• The challenge of finding new uses for project-specific data.
• How PostEra validates its models.
• Why PostEra makes its models less black box and how they go about it.
• The importance of model interpretability and how PostEra develops interpretable ML.
• Aaron’s advice for other leaders of AI-powered startups.
• His vision for PostEra’s impact in the next three to five years. 

Quotes:

“Though being reasonably competent on the machine learning side, I had a very, very steep learning curve when it came to getting up to speed with drug discovery chemistry and the applications of AI in that domain.” — Aaron Morris

“Drug discovery is going from biology to chemistry to medicine and PostEra squarely focuses, at least for now, on the chemistry angle. Our main focus is to build the world’s most advanced machine learning platform for what is referred to as medicinal chemistry.” — Aaron Morris

“PostEra is really the first AI company to pioneer machine learning across all three stages of how to design a molecule, how to make the molecule, and how to select the optimal set of molecules to test.” — Aaron Morris

“There is a lot of project-specific data that gets generated, and often what that means for PostEra is we’re having to be very inventive about how we try to get the most out of data even if it is not relevant.” — Aaron Morris

“If you want to build defensibility as a company, you have to have more than just innovations on model architecture.” — Aaron Morris

“Your typical drug today is taking anywhere between eight to ten years to come to market and obviously, we want to really accelerate that.” — Aaron Morris

Links:

Aaron Morris on LinkedIn

Aaron Morris on Twitter

PostEra

PostEra on Twitter

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