OutSee has secured £50,000 through Innovate UK’s Investor Partnership Grant to pilot an agentic AI sub-system that will automate early-stage triage of drug targets generated by Nomaly, its core AI genomics platform.
Genomics and drug discovery company OutSee has secured £50,000 in funding through Innovate UK’s Investor Partnership Grant to develop an artificial intelligence system aimed at speeding up the validation of potential drug targets.
The grant, jointly funded by Innovate UK and Empirical Ventures alongside matching investment, will support a pilot study for a prototype target validation sub-system. The system is designed to provide an initial assessment of potential drug targets identified by Nomaly, OutSee’s core AI genomics engine.
OutSee currently relies on its scientific team to manually validate targets identified by Nomaly, but this proposed agentic AI sub-system would provide an initial triage of these outputs, helping to streamline the validation pipeline and identify targets with the strongest potential for therapeutic development.
This pilot is a valuable opportunity to expand on 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.”
Dr Julian Gough, CEO and Founder of OutSee
Scaling target discovery
The company said the technology could help address a central bottleneck as it expands its target discovery activities. By automating the initial assessment of Nomaly’s outputs, the system is intended to allow OutSee’s scientists to dedicate more time to detailed validation work.
“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,” said Dan Bolser, Principal Bioinformatician at OutSee. ”This in turn will allow our scientific team to focus more attention on validating novel drug targets, where their expertise has the greatest impact.”
Nomaly uses an AI-driven biological engine to identify potential therapeutic targets from genomic data. OutSee says the platform can be applied to small or previously analysed datasets, helping to uncover targets that may remain undetected through other approaches.
Alongside partnerships with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, OutSee is also advancing an in-house target discovery pipeline focused on identifying novel therapeutic opportunities.
Focus on neurological and rare diseases
OutSee’s internal research is currently focused on neurology, rare diseases and metabolic diseases. This includes a Longitude Prize on ALS-funded project seeking to identify novel targets for treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The company also has an ongoing partnership with o2h Discovery to initiate a drug discovery programme using OutSee’s lead target asset.
The new funding will allow OutSee to test whether agentic AI can provide a scalable first stage of target validation. If successful, the approach could help the company assess a greater volume of targets generated by Nomaly and accelerate their progression towards therapeutic development.
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