Exscientia is at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery and design. By fusing the power of AI with the discovery experience of seasoned drug hunters, Exscientia is the first company to automate drug design, surpassing conventional approaches. The company listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market in October 2021. Frontier IP completed its exit in February 2024, having raised a total of about £14 million. The original cost of the shares to the Group was less than £2,000.

Among its achievements are the first AI-created drug to enter human clinical trials in a joint development with Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma. Its other partnerships include collaborations with Bayer AG, Celgene, Sanofi, GT Apeiron, Rallybio and Evotec.

Exscientia’s innovative Centaur Chemist™ platform enables breakthrough productivity gains as well as new approaches to improve drug efficacy. Novel compounds are automatically designed and prioritised for synthesis by its AI systems, which rapidly evolve compounds towards the desired candidate criteria for clinical development.

Exscientia systems learn from both existing data resources and experimental data from each design cycle. The principle is similar to how a human would learn, but the AI process is far more effective at identifying and assimilating multiple subtle and complex trends to balance potency, selectivity and pharmacokinetic criteria.

As a result, the AI-driven process is more likely to achieve the end goal and to do this more rapidly and efficiently than traditional human endeavour.

Exscientia is collaborating with several leading pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, has its headquarters in Oxford, UK with further offices in the UK, USA and Japan.