The Cambridge-based company will use the funding, alongside matching investment, to pilot a target validation sub-system designed to provide an initial assessment and triage of potential drug targets generated by Nomaly, its AI-driven predictive genomics platform.
Tackling the drug target validation bottleneck
According to OutSee, target validation is currently a largely manual process carried out by its scientific team — creating a bottleneck, as Nomaly generates large volumes of potential targets.
The proposed agentic AI sub-system will initially screen and prioritise Nomaly outputs, helping identify targets with the strongest potential for therapeutic development.
By automating elements of the early-stage assessment process, OutSee aims to scale its validation pipeline while allowing its scientists to focus on the targets requiring deeper biological investigation.
Nomaly uses an AI-based biological engine to identify novel therapeutic targets from genomic datasets, including small or previously analysed datasets where targets may be missed by conventional approaches.
OutSee is applying the platform across an in-house drug discovery pipeline focused on neurology, rare diseases and metabolic diseases.
Its activities include a Longitude Prize on ALS-funded project investigating novel therapeutic targets for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The company is also working with o2h Discovery on a drug discovery programme using an OutSee lead target asset.
Dr Julian Gough, CEO and Founder of OutSee, said the pilot would expand Nomaly’s core capabilities.
By building agentic AI into our validation pipeline, we will maximise the impact of our exceptional target discovery scientists and accelerate discovery of high-quality novel targets.
"We’d like to thank Innovate UK and our investors, Empirical Ventures, for their support in this project and look forward to sharing positive results from the study."
Dan Bolser, Principal Bioinformatician, OutSee, added: “With a tailored agentic AI sub-system in place, we’ll be able to quickly scale up our validation pipeline, removing a key bottleneck by automatically triaging Nomaly's high-volume output."
This, in turn, will allow our scientific team to focus more attention on validating novel drug targets, where their expertise has the greatest impact.
The project will investigate whether automated initial triage can accelerate the progression of novel drug targets while increasing the impact of OutSee’s scientific expertise.
If successful, the prototype could provide a scalable approach for prioritising AI-generated drug targets and supporting earlier-stage decision-making within the drug discovery process.
