Biotech firm to develop AI platform for drug discovery with tech giants

Vecura will be able to help pharma firms identify drug candidates in six minutes

- Lee Li Ying

Singapore biotech firm Nanyang Biologics is expanding and diversifying its revenue stream beyond discovering cancer and neurodegenerative disorder drugs by supercharging its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled drug discovery platform.

When development of the platform, Vecura, is completed in 2026, it will be able to help pharmaceutical companies identify potential drug candidates as quickly as in six minutes.

In traditional drug discovery, this process takes a long time because researchers must screen millions of molecules to find those that act on the right biological target, and rule out the many that are unsafe, unstable or ineffective.

But AI can help drug discovery because it can quickly analyze huge amounts of biological and chemical data, and predict which molecules are most likely to work as safe and effective drugs.