IDEAYA Biosciences Partners With ATTMOS To Advance AI/ML-Driven Oncology Drug Discovery

(RTTNews) - IDEAYA Biosciences, Inc. (IDYA), a precision medicine oncology company, announced on Monday that it has entered into a research collaboration with ATTMOS to advance its physics-based computational small molecule discovery platform. This initiative aims to identify therapeutic solutions for oncology targets previously considered undruggable.

The partnership will integrate IDEAYA's expertise in structural biology and drug discovery with ATTMOS's capabilities in computational chemistry, high-performance computing, and software development. The primary objective is to develop a workflow solution for high-throughput absolute binding free energy perturbation (ABFEP) predictions, enabling large-scale virtual screening with improved accuracy. This approach could set a new industry standard for efficient drug discovery against novel biological targets.

Chief Scientific Officer Michael White, Ph.D., noted that traditional AI/ML-driven drug discovery has mainly been successful for well-understood targets but struggles with first-in-class opportunities. IDEAYA aims to enhance its computational drug discovery capabilities to overcome these limitations. Chief Technology Officer Paul Barsanti, Ph.D., emphasized that the collaboration will apply engineering principles to drug discovery at scale, facilitating the pursuit of unprecedented oncology targets.

The project will utilize the Amber molecular dynamics suite for GPU-accelerated free energy simulations. IDEAYA will train and refine ABFEP-based models using extensive real-world data from its successful drug discovery campaigns. These models will support virtual screening of vast chemical libraries, accelerating the identification of small-molecule ligands for novel oncology targets and addressing critical unmet clinical needs.

IDYA is currently trading at $19.82 or 3.67% lower on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.