Who is Cyrus’s biggest competitor?
By: Cyrus Biotechnology
Tags: Drug Discovery, Science, Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology

At Cyrus we’re often asked who our biggest competitor is. The answer is simple:

Skepticism

Here’s a sample of that, fresh from the wilds of the internet in early 2019:

“computational protein design is impossible” — the internet

We are bringing the computational protein design tools in Rosetta to the market, tools that have now been used to create a multitude of incredible things from human-designed fluorescent proteins, to artificial vaccine-like capsid assemblies, to the design of candidate anti-cancer biologics. But many people haven’t heard, and if they have heard, they, like the twitter user above, just don’t believe it.

One difficulty in telling the story of Cyrus’s protein engineering tools is that as we add customers they are doing exciting work, but we don’t see that work directly because we are building a tool to enable that work, and in cases where we do hear about it, it will still take time before that work is available in peer-reviewed publications. As time passes, we will be excited to be able to share some successes in drug development and discovery.

Another difficulty, and a key reason for skepticism, is that many drug discovery scientists tried computational methods in the 1980s and 1990s, and those methods largely did not live up to the promise of Computer-Aided Drug Discovery (CADD). Here’s an example of that from Fortune in 1981 (sidebar image).

The age of computerized drug design is here! In 1981!

Reaching the cover of Fortune means that an idea has reached the peak of its hype cycle, if it has not yet reached the peak of enterprise value (which would typically be the other way to reach the cover of the magazine). It is also probably obvious that there’s only been one industrial revolution, the one started by Watt’s engine, and our most recent revolution is a computer/internet one, not a second industrial one.

Of course, many individuals who were observers of the early CADD boom have a healthy skepticism of computational methods.

In fact, one of our earliest Pharma customers at Cyrus explicitly mentioned earlier attempts to design drugs by computer in the 1990s that had not worked out. We entered some discussions about how “now is different” because our algorithms are different, based both in physics and in large datasets of known molecules. Ultimately we managed to convince them to do a pilot project, understanding that their skepticism was legitimate, and the only way to prove that “now is different” is to actually do the calculations, test the molecules in the lab, and show that they outperform standard lab methods. So we did that, and the molecules outperformed by orders of magnitude, and we are now moving on to other projects with that firm in other indications.

Since the early 2000’s small molecule discovery has also turned a major corner, becoming a key part of nearly any drug discovery program, and beginning to overcome that skepticism in small molecule discovery as well. We’ll write more on the relative technical insights undergirding small molecule computation, especially how it differs from the latest in protein modeling.

Over time as we’re able to tell some of these stories in more detail, we will be able to overcome our biggest competitor, and that Fortune magazine cover will have just been 40 years too early in describing the molecular revolution that will be “the next industrial revolution”.