Biotechnology company, Atomic AI, is announcing its launch along with a $35 million dollars Series A round led by Playground Global.  The startup offers a platform that fuses AI technology with structural biology to discover and design new RNA drugs.  Atomic says the process aims to enable the creation of medicines for so-called undruggable diseases, which are diseases that can't typically be targeted by pharmaceuticals.  Raphael Townshend, founder and CEO of Atomic AI, joined Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.

Biotechnology Company Atomic AI Launches with $35 Million Funding Round

biotechnology company Atomic Ai announcing its launch along with the $35 million series A round led by playground. Global. The startup offering a platform that uses AI technology was structural biology to discover and design new RNA drugs. Well, Atomic says the process aims to enable the creation of medicines for so called undrinkable diseases which are diseases that can typically be targeted by pharmaceuticals. So joining me now is Rafael Townsend founder and ceo of Atomic Ai. Rafael is great to have you on the show. Tell me more about this technology and how it is such a game changer. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Uh yeah at a high level Atomic AI is really trying to integrate this cutting edge sort of AI technology with this RNA structural biology and this tight iterative loop really to unlock you know this new form of RNA drug discovery and at a high level really that involves these experts that are quite scarce in both the R. And a biology field but also the AI side of the equation. So talk to me about how it might be able to treat some of these so far. Kind oven drug a Ble diseases or ailments if you will of course a lot of the drugs on the market today really target proteins. You know, 99% of drugs out there. If you remember your basic biology DNA goes to RNA goes to proteins by going one step earlier in the process. We're effectively increasing the attack surface And giving ourselves new ways of going after these diseases that are effectively undrinkable at the protein level. Mm Hmm. million dollars in funding as you're set to launch. How are you going to build out the company to have a widespread impact? You know, we've seen some dramatic improvements in terms of our core sort of platform technology. And so we're really looking to continue scaling that platform to really enable our partnerships across the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, as well as really launching our own first internal drug discovery programs to really demonstrate the utility of this platform. And how does it work? I mean, do you envision something uh that is a drug? It is a pill basically that your technology will be able to eventually deliver Or is the treatment mechanism perhaps a little bit different? Yeah, it is actually going into a pill, very simple delivery, taking it orally once a day. That kind of thing is really what we're going after. Uh you know, a number of these other kinds of therapies, often times a very complicated delivery systems. You know, I'm talking surgeries every month or spinal injections and things like that. Yeah, that is that is obviously costly and very time consuming. And I'm sure probably not the easiest thing to manage either. What are some of these conditions, rafael that by your measure are undrinkable diseases that you are intending specifically to target. Yeah, I mean, there's a wide range of interesting targets out there. Some of these spaces that are particular interest are, you know, various cancers, Right. The neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, uh, you know, infectious diseases such as Covid actively itself, but also, you know, zika or dengue. There's a whole range of as well of rare diseases out there that are sort of this wide open space to be targeted through these RNA based RNA targeting medicine. All right, Rafael Townsend, founder and Ceo of Atomic AI Raphael. Congrats and thank you.