Arctoris: Combining robotics and data science for accelerated drug discovery

Arctoris is a company that uses robotics and data science to speed up the process of drug discovery. Its technology helps identify new potential therapeutics and improves the efficiency of drug discovery. This should lead to faster, more accurate and repeatable results and will help to bring new treatments to patients sooner.

The Company's technology has the potential to significantly accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development. Arctoris is committed to using its technology to improve the lives of patients and make a positive impact on the healthcare system.

How does the technology work?

Arctoris' Ulysses platform brings together wet lab robotic automation and machine learning to automate the execution of experiments and the collection and analysis of the associated data.

The healthcare industry’s traditional approach to drug discovery and pre-clinical development has been essentially unchanged over the last 40-50 years. It is prone to human error, contamination, poor reproducibility, and overall lacks data integrity.

These problems have contributed significantly to very poor R&D productivity in the pharma industry and failure rates of 90% or more. The net result of this structural inefficiency is not just collapsing productivity in the sector over the last 60 years but also the fact that new therapies take longer to reach patients and end up costing more than they should.

The combination of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) drives superior outcomes in drug discovery as it eliminates human error, dramatically improves reproducibility, drives deeper, richer high integrity data and allows for better insights to be generated from that data.

Arctoris’s approach is new and different because it is pioneering a novel drug discovery and development model enabled by robotics and data science in an industry craving innovation.

Who is behind the company?

Founded in Oxford in 2016, Arctoris has a global team consisting of biotech and pharma veterans, robotics and machine learning engineers, as well as seasoned life sciences executives. The two founders, Martin-Immanuel Bittner, who is a medical doctor and cancer researcher, and Tom Fleming, who is a chemist and robotics specialist, met at Oxford University while studying for their PhDs.

Part of the inspiration for the Company’s creation came from the recognition that the healthcare industry’s traditional approach to drug discovery and pre-clinical development is arcane and highly inefficient.

Their aim is to build Arctoris' commercial operations alongside a diversified portfolio of wholly-owned and partnered pre-clinical assets, which it can selectively monetise through development partnerships and license deals.

Arctoris is also an enabler for AI drug discovery businesses, all of whom require wet lab facilities and high-quality data to train and validate their AI. Arctoris’ platform already generates data for several third-party biopharma companies, including several top ten pharma businesses

Why AI and robotics?

Most informed observers of this industry believe the future of drug discovery will be data-driven. But, if these new approaches are to succeed, the data that sophisticated AI and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms interrogate has to be of the right quality and depth. This is where the combination of AI, ML and robotics comes in. By using end-to-end robotic processes Arctoris generates automated data on a scale and of a quality that cannot be matched with incumbent, human error-strewn processes. This results in better, faster more reliable drug discovery and development, saving money and time.

Arctoris' technology has the potential to revolutionize the process of drug discovery, making it faster and more accurate. If you're interested in learning more about Arctoris, please get in touch.