Totus Medicines, a drug discovery company using revolutionary chemical biology technologies to create life-changing covalent therapeutics for untreatable diseases, today announced the start of a collaboration with Mila, the Quebec artificial intelligence (AI) institute, which rallies the largest concentration of academic deep-learning researchers. The AI-focused partnership will enable both organizations to leverage each other’s distinct expertise and knowledge for drug discovery. This effort comes at a particularly important time for Totus, as the company is on track to advance a drug candidate into first-in-human clinical trials later this year.
“We are very excited about this partnership and the technological and drug development progress that can eventually result from it,” said Totus Chief Data Officer Dr. John Davies, Ph.D. “Artificial intelligence plays a key role in the development of Totus’ drug discovery platform. A partnership with Mila gives us access to some of the brightest minds in AI, which will surely help us take our platform to the next level to treat the untreatable with even more precision and efficiency.”
“Totus’ drug design platform has great potential, and we are eager to collaborate and offer our research and know-how,” said Stéphane Létourneau, Executive Vice President at Mila. “Totus’ chemical biology expertise, coupled with our AI expertise, has the potential to transform the process of drug discovery as we know it.”
The partnership will also help Totus attract and retain talented individuals during a time of rapid growth, as the company plans to expand internally through the hiring of over 50 new employees this year. Having access to Mila’s extraordinary talent pool will lead to promising opportunities and potential future hires.
