Mila partners with Ventus Therapeutics to industrialize rational drug discovery
Montreal, November 1st, 2022 — Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute announced a new partnership with Ventus Therapeutics, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company utilizing structural biology and a proprietary computational chemistry platform to identify and develop small molecule therapeutics across a broad range of diseases. Through this partnership, Ventus Therapeutics will collaborate with Mila to incorporate advanced machine learning capabilities into its ReSOLVETM drug discovery platform.
“We believe that step-function improvement in drug discovery timelines is possible by combining the power of physics, machine learning and experimentation,” said Victor Lobanov, Ph.D., Ventus Senior Vice President and Head of Computational Sciences. “We look forward to benefiting from Mila’s world-class expertise in artificial intelligence.”
Ventus’ research site in Montreal is a growing, fully integrated drug discovery lab facility that currently employs more than 30 scientists. In 2023, Ventus plans to double its footprint in Montreal with the opening of a new 23,000-square-foot facility to further support the expansion of ReSOLVE and the company’s pipeline programs.
“The complementary strengths of Ventus and Mila afford the opportunity to bring new ideas for the discovery of drug candidates for novel targets,” said Jason Burch, Ph.D., Head of Drug Discovery Strategy at Ventus. “Leveraging the geographic proximity of our organizations is an added bonus that will help us build a close partnership.”
“We are pleased to partner with Ventus Therapeutics, whose technology aims to address the current limitations of small molecule drug discovery. AI application in healthcare is a rapidly growing field at Mila, and we look forward to collaborating with their team to help accelerate the discovery of drug candidate molecules for unmet health needs,” said Mila Professor Jian Tang.
About Ventus Therapeutics
Ventus Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company deploying leading-edge structural biology and computational chemistry tools to create novel small molecule medicines for challenging targets, with an initial focus on immunology, inflammation and neurology. The Company’s proprietary drug discovery platform ReSOLVE gives it the ability to discover and develop medicines through unique insights into protein targets and to create dynamic blueprints that can guide the development of differentiated small molecule medicines. The Company’s lead programs target key innate immune modulators, including NLRP3 and cGAS. The Company aims to use its ReSOLVE platform to improve the way medicines are discovered and developed, with the ultimate goal of restoring the health of people facing serious illnesses. For more information, please visit www.ventustx.com and engage with Ventus on Twitter @Ventus_Tx or on LinkedIn.
About Mila
Founded in 1993 by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal, Mila is an artificial intelligence research institute that today brings together more than 1000 researchers specialized in machine learning. Based in Montreal, Mila’s mission is to be a global hub of scientific advances that inspires innovation and the growth of AI for the benefit of all. Mila is a non-profit organization recognized worldwide for its important contributions to the field of deep learning, particularly in the areas of language modeling, machine translation, object recognition and generative models.
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