Pharmacelera’s Quantum Drug Discovery Remedy

Photo by Daniel Tafjord on Unsplash

We need innovative companies in the pharmaceutical industry now more than ever. A Spanish startup has some ideas that may shift the tide

Pizza Corona

If somebody had told me a few months ago that the world would soon descend into all the horrors depicted in Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 action thriller Contagion, I would have laughed at them.

Okay, I knew what was going on in China, and in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province specifically. Yet as callous as it seems, it was far away, a distant nine or ten-hour flight away — it wasn’t going to affect me nor those close to me.

And then the news that the Italian province of Lombardy, in the rich, industrial northern heartland, had seen its first cases.

Still no need to worry. I even had a chuckle with one of my Italian students, Paolo from Milan, who relayed the message to the class that everything was fine and dandy in his homeland. The only low point was his anger at the French for a video entitled ‘Pizza Corona’ shown on the satirical show Groland on Canal+ making the headlines and the subsequent French apology.

But then it took a nasty turn: Spain got hit with a whammy. The United States and the UK, too. Germany and other European nations. Suppression mode is the modus operandi for most countries now, hoping it’s not too late.

It’s funny with the ‘developed’ West, isn’t it? Whenever serious catastrophes happen around the globe, be them tsunamis, earthquakes, famines, plagues, or decades-long civil wars, we take them with a pinch of salt, looking askance to what all the fuss is about concerning our myopic worldview.

The worldview where we are the centre of everything. Take 9/11 as an example — as terrible as a day as that was, and as much as it scarred the American psyche for a generation, to others in the world — take a Tibetan mountain village or a fishing community on the Pacific coast of Chile — it was of little importance in the grand scheme of things.

Another was the day Princess Diana was tragically killed — I was in Mexico at the time, and I remember finding out about it at a newsstand in Guadelara where her face was on every tabloid. Back in the UK, there was a period of national mourning, a time for the British to reevaluate themselves, criticize the paparazzi for their offhanded tactics and exclamations of ‘life will never be the same again’.

And rightly so.

Yet, there’s a narrative thread here that hits at the heart of what I’m getting at: whenever a crisis appears in the west, ie. western Europe and North America, the ‘world is altered, a shift in thought occurs, a moral exactitude established.

We are, sadly — or seem to think we are — the authors of humanity’s book.

The Covid-19 pandemic is doing it now. It only seems to be a pandemic when it affects our self-centred, consumerist shores, wrecking our comfortable app-led lives where many Uber drivers, couriers and other unfortunates that are the backbone of the gig economy don’t even earn enough to feed their families and pay the rent.

The response seems, especially in the US — the richest nation on earth and one of the most unequal in terms of wealth distribution — like a doctor’s handwriting: tragic in all aspects.

Maybe this crisis is a message. A message telling us two main things hold a country together, that are the glue of contentment — education and health. The rest, naturally, can follow afterward to compliment them.

With the disruption in the education of billions of children a reality because of the coronavirus, we are looking upon the skill and resilience of our medical professional spread across the globe to put an end to this scourge that, if not put to bed in the next year, could potentially have the same repercussions as the Spanish flu did a century ago, decimating the weak and vulnerable.

The time to act now — self-quarantining can only go so far!

Quantum Caped Crusader

It’s a good we live in the age of quantum computers, for it is there, in this realm, that the future calls.

Quantum computing (QC) has been a running joke to many for at least twenty years. Richard Feynman and David Deutsch’s proclamations are only starting to be heard.

Not anymore, though.

As we speak, more and more startups, as well as multinationals with QC programs, are finding how quantum information systems can radically improve upon computational chemistry and drug design.

And boy, do we need them.

Startups like Riverlane, ProteinQure, ChemAlive, Hafnium Labs, Cloud Pharmaceuticals, Entropica Labs, Qulab, Silicon Therapeutics, and XtalPi are joining the big boys in finding the medicine of tomorrow, today.

Another on the list is Pharmacelera, a Barcelona-based startup whose services include ‘software solutions using proprietary algorithms designed to explore a larger and more diverse chemical space’.

Pharmacelera

Founded in 2015 by three academics from Catalonia, Spain, Pharmacelera is a company that has a lot going for it.

‘Pharmacelera is a high-performance computing rational drug design [company] that relies on more than twenty years of research at the University of Barcelona.’

 —  Enric Gibert, CEO and co-founder

The startup offers several services that cater to clients looking for potential solutions to drug discovery.

The first one is Pharmscreen, a ‘software package designed to find candidate molecules with larger chemical diversity from proprietary, public or commercial compound libraries’.

PharmQSAR, on the other hand, is a ‘3D quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) software package that builds statistical models (CoMFA, CoMSIA and HyPhar) based on data obtained from experimental assays’.

The startup also offers scientific workflow systems (SWS), as well as demo and licenses that cover its software tools.

Still not convinced?

Well take a look at the co-founding team:

CEO Enric Gibert, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), can also boast a decade’s worth of experience working for Intel as a computer engineer in different capacities. Enric has more than twenty scientific publications and almost the same amount of filed patents.

‘The 3 pillars of our technology are: accurate Quantum-Mechanics (QM) algorithms for molecular modeling, Machine Learning (ML) and High-Performance Computing.’

 — Pharmacelera

Javier Luque, a full-time professor at the University of Barcelona (UB) in Computational Biology and Drug Design, is the startup’s CSO. A prolific author of more than 400 scientific papers to his name, his acumen can certainly add value to the startup’s strategy going forth.

The third person of the team is CTO Enric Herrero. Like his colleague Gibert, he holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and worked at Intel. Among his other experience in the world of academia, he has been a research visitor at the University of California at San Diego.

As far as capital goes, Pharmacelera raised €290,000 in funding by an undisclosed investor in a Seed round in the summer of 2016, as well as a €50,000 grant from the European Innovation Council in 2018.

It’s companies like Pharmacelera that will play an important role in the future of drug discovery. With quantum information systems a key aspect of their strategy, let's just hope they can help eradicate viruses like Covid-19 and any others out there in the decades to come.