Sirenas has received a new grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance ATLANTIS, the company's proprietary drug discovery technology. Sirenas has now received two research grant awards from the foundation totaling $1.68 M.
ATLANTIS uses "big data" approaches to uncover the relationships between millions of natural small molecule metabolites and disease relevant biological assays. This process enables Sirenas to gain insights into the therapeutic potential of each molecule more rapidly than traditional drug discovery approaches. With the funds from the foundation, Sirenas will accelerate the use of ATLANTIS, including the integration of machine learning approaches, to identify therapeutic candidates to treat widespread infectious diseases including tuberculosis and malaria.
"Sirenas is honored to be a long-time recipient of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funding to support breakthrough drug discovery approaches like ATLANTIS to uncover new ways to treat these debilitating infectious diseases," said Jake Beverage, PharmD., Co-Founder and CEO of Sirenas. "Funds from this grant will broaden the use of our ATLANTIS technology, enhance our fundamental processes to enable efficient drug discovery, and deepen our focus on infectious diseases."
In September 2015, Sirenas launched its proprietary data mining technology named ATLANTIS to uncover the therapeutic potential of nature's chemistry in a wide range of global microbiome collections. Initially, Sirenas has deployed this technology in marine environments to sustainably collect samples of organisms such as sponges, cyanobacteria and algae, with their commensal microbial communities, providing a source of valuable chemical diversity. Through these efforts, Sirenas has amassed a highly curated collection of thousands of nature-inspired molecules that can be interrogated for their therapeutic potential.
ATLANTIS uses data mining approaches to understand the relationships between millions of natural small molecule metabolites and disease relevant biological assays. ATLANTIS provides rapid insights into the therapeutic potential, chemical novelty, structure activity relationships and global distribution of each metabolite. This functionality enables the uncovering of therapeutic leads from a previously hidden, rich pool of privileged chemistry that can be leveraged to help tackle the greatest unmet disease needs such as infectious diseases and oncology.