As we now head into spring, we have restarted our reviews of companies of the day. Today we look at ApexQubit, which is aiming at changing the pharmaceutical and drug discovery process using classical and quantum computing. Drug discovery pipelines take up to ten years and can cost billions of dollars. Computational approaches are combinatorially expensive and therefore techniques that can reduce the affective sampling space could be advantageous.
The early stage start-up is founded by Denis Farnosov as the CEO and Nihil Khaine, the latter functions as the CTO. Quantum Computing is actively being explored to help find suitable drugs and/or targets. A number of pharmaceutical giants such as Merck are also busy exploring Quantum Computing. ApexQubit was incorporated in 2018 and is a private organization.
ApexQubit is a biotechnology company that is harnessing frontier technologies for discovery of new medicines and better health for humanity.
Not being exclusively quantum, the company is hoping to leverage the talent in the classical space as well as entering the Quantum space. A recent publication by one its team is titled “Quantum Generative Models for Small Molecule Drug Discovery”. The team is looking to provide insight and work with pharma to assist in the process of drug dicovery. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been an interesting and valuable new edition to Deep Learning. Of course, this technique can also take on a Quantum flavour – drug candidates generated that obey
chemical and physical properties and show affinity towards
binding with the receptor for a target disease.
Apex has received some early stage funding (less than $500k) and is likely seeking further funding. Find out more about ApexQubit from their website.