Meet the startup at the forefront of quantum computing for drug discovery
Named a top European quantum computing company to watch, Rahko originally evolved out of joint research groups at UCL, where PhD students could explore the boundaries and intersection of different technologies. It wasn’t long until the student team decided to take their research out of the academic environment and into a more commercial setting, raising £1.3 million in a seed round led by Balderton Capital early on.
Today, Rahko is a machine learning company building a quantum discovery platform to more accurately predict the behaviour and properties of drugs, with the goal of speeding up and bringing down the cost of drug discovery.
“It takes on average $2.6 billion and around 10 years for a drug to reach the market,” Rahko CEO Leonard Wossnig says. “Especially when facing an ageing population and global pandemics like COVID-19, the process is too slow and expensive to be sustainable.”
Enter Rahko. The startup combines three technologies — quantum computing, machine learning and computational chemistry — to reduce failure rates by predicting how drugs will behave early on. According to Wossnig, in turn this would bring down attrition in the pharmaceutical industry, and reduce timescale and costs.
“We combine these technologies because while quantum computing is extremely powerful in predicting chemical systems accurately — how a chemical reacts to another one or how a small drug molecule binds to a protein, which is a key mechanism when targeting diseases,” Wossnig says, “we need to be able to do this for immensely large volumes of potential drug candidates, so we need to not only be precise, but also extremely fast. That’s where AI comes in.”
Rahko joined Conception X early on in the team’s journey, back in 2018, to receive pitching training and learn how to make a business plan.
“For a first-time founder, the programme is very helpful, and so is the exposure and support you get,” says Wossnig. “Having access to the right network of people — getting that knowledge early on — makes such a difference, because it really helps you avoid common founder mistakes.”
A lot has happened for Rahko since leaving Conception X. After raising capital and building a team of around a dozen people, the startup secured partnerships with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, such as Merck.
Rahko was also selected as the sole European launch partner for Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, working with customers to identify the key bottlenecks and requirements for commercial application of quantum computing.
Currently, the team is working on several projects that are still confidential in collaboration with key international players, and preparing to fundraise in the summer. The goal for 2022 is to further refine their product and offering.
“There are some big challenges in the pharmaceutical R&D pipeline, particularly when it comes to identifying and optimising medical compounds from the very beginning — not just to ensure they have the right mechanism, but also optimised in terms of efficacy and safety for humans,” Wossnig says. “It’s a difficult problem and we have a very unique solution that has already been demonstrated to outperform current state-of-the-art for several key problems in drug discovery .”
Follow the team’s journey at rahko.ai
