Honour for CSO maintains upward trajectory for Ignota Labs
Since announcing a seed raise of £5.5 million earlier this year, Ignota Labs has in-licensed multiple drugs, doubled the size of its team and entered into a collaboration with global healthcare company Sanofi.
The multiple drugs and target disease areas are being kept under wraps currently but Ignota Labs has doubled headcount to 12 – all of them in Cambridge - and clinched a lucrative and prestige-packed collaboration with global healthcare company Sanofi.
The collaboration with Sanofi is part of the iDEA-TECH competition in which Ignota Labs is collaborating to solve a prominent public safety concern - liver damage through PFAS 'forever chemicals' as well as working on a Sanofi project.
The award consists of €120,000 in funding and dedicated support from Sanofi’s expert team. This partnership will empower Ignota Labs to advance its groundbreaking SAFEPATH platform, a proprietary AI-driven tool designed to address critical safety challenges that often derail drug development.
By combining financial resources with Sanofi’s scientific guidance, the collaboration aims to accelerate innovation and maximise the platform’s impact.
And the glory keeps on coming. Chief Scientific Officer Dr Jordan Lane, has now been appointed Industry and Enterprise Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. This new fellowship will bring together some of the leading names in Cambridge tech and biotech to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration. The accolade recognises Dr Lane's extensive experience in the AI drug discovery space.
Despite being the smallest college by student number, Clare Hall is home to the largest Visiting Fellowship programme, with around 40 visiting senior academics in residence each year, as well as 24 Research Fellows, and senior members from varying professions beyond academia. The result is a diverse and close-knit international community with a focus on research.
Dr Lane leads innovation at Ignota Labs, leveraging his extensive background in drug discovery and AI to pioneer transformative treatments in global patient care. He is driven by a profound commitment to revolutionising drug discovery, integrating artificial intelligence with bioscience to enhance drug safety and efficacy.
He said: “Cambridge’s innovation ecosystem thrives on cross-disciplinary collaboration and intellectually stimulating engagement with a diverse range of people. It is an honour for me to be appointed to this Fellowship and I look forward to working with the extraordinary community at Clare Hall.”
Ignota Labs rescues promising but failing drugs, bringing new life to abandoned projects and new hope to patients. More than half of all clinical trials fail due to safety issues, resulting in a staggering $400 billion annual loss and delaying life-saving treatments for patients.
Its proprietary AI platform, SAFEPATH, uses cutting-edge deep learning to address these challenges by uncovering the mechanisms behind drug toxicity. Unlike traditional safety assessments that identify what went wrong, the AI platform combines cheminformatics, bioinformatics and multimodal data analysis to explain why and how safety issues occur, delivering actionable insights to refine or repurpose drug candidates.
Ignota Labs is building a robust pipeline to bring safer drugs to market faster, partnering to develop and co-develop assets that might otherwise fail, and accelerating the delivery of vital therapies to patients in need.