Ariana Pharmaceuticals, a drug discovery company combining artificial intelligence and experimental methods to predict the behaviour of novel molecules, announced that its KEM methodology is now available for service and collaboration projects, a company release said.

KEM (Knowledge Extraction and Management) integrates and exhaustively mines multiple data sources and suggests improved compounds for use in pharmaceutical applications. It incorporates artificial intelligence systems which have already been successfully commercialised in the banking, nuclear and legal industries.

"Today's announcement means that pharmaceutical companies can now begin to benefit from our technology and the two years' development work that has gone into it since the creation of Ariana Pharmaceuticals," says Ariana's founder and chief executive officer, Dr Mohammad Afshar. "We are already ramping up our business development activities and expect to report several successes in the next few months."

Ariana believes KEM has the potential to significantly decrease drug discovery timelines by improving the prediction of the quality profile of molecules. KEM scores over most competing solutions in a number of areas. "Quality" molecules need to display desirable properties: good Absorption and Distribution, good Metabolism and Excretion profiles and limited Toxicity (ADMET). The parallel optimization of these multiple properties remains a major challenge as currently available systems fail to make predictions about molecules that are not related to already known examples, and therefore are of limited use for novel drug candidates.

In addition, current software products do not provide predictions that are easy to interpret, largely due to their use of descriptors that are not easily understood by the chemist and not easy to translate into better molecular structures. Hence competing software has yet to have a major impact on drug discovery. Ariana's new technology is specifically designed to overcome the issues described above, and is expected to have a significant influence on the efficiency of drug discovery.

Starting with validated targets and structural data, Ariana uses a combination of proprietary computational, crystallographic and biochemical methods to expedite early identification and optimization of quality lead molecules. The KEM technology is available on flexible terms according to client needs, for example a fee for service basis, or license fee and milestone payments.