Baio Labs receives CHF 150,000 from Venture Kick

The EPFL spin-off Baio Labs has obtained CHF 150,000 from Venture Kick to advance its generative AI platform for early-stage drug discovery. By designing novel molecules for specific therapeutic targets in seconds, the biotech startup aims to help researchers identify promising drug candidates faster and at significantly lower cost.

Finding new drug candidates traditionally involves screening large libraries of existing molecules to identify those that could act on a specific disease target. Despite considerable time and expense, these approaches explore only a tiny fraction of the vast number of possible molecules. Depending on the target, such discovery campaigns can take several years and cost millions of dollars.

Baio Labs is developing its platform, Drugon, to shift this process from searching existing chemical libraries to rationally designing new molecules for a specific target. Powered by a generative AI model that considers the three-dimensional structure of the target, the platform can generate novel small molecules in seconds. Drugon brings molecular design, synthesis, and experimental validation into one integrated ecosystem, enabling medicinal chemists to move more efficiently from a therapeutic target to potential drug candidates.

With Drugon, Baio Labs targets a rapidly expanding computational drug discovery market. The team aims to work with pharmaceutical companies to materially reduce their development timelines and bring down the cost of the drug discovery process.

The CHF 150,000 from Venture Kick will help Baio Labs to scale up R&D efforts and implement their go-to-market strategy.

Baio Labs was founded by Ilia Igashov, Arne Schneuing, and Bruno Correia, two EPFL PhD students and a professor who are pioneering the use of generative AI for structure-based drug design.

➡️ Source: Press Release | 📸 ©Baio Labs, CTO Arne Schneuing and CEO Ilia Igashov