Meet Dalton, a new AI-powered drug discovery platform
Dr Garry Pairaudeau, DaltonTx's CEO and co-founder.
Just a few months after emerging from stealth with a mission to build adaptive AI platforms for drug discovery, UK startup DaltonTx has officially launched its platform and revealed its first client.
The platform – called Dalton – is intended to handle the full drug discovery process, from raw data and model training to molecular design, synthesis, and decision-making, creating a "continuous learning engine" for both small-molecule and biologic medicines.
The London company, based at the King's Cross life sciences and tech hub and led by former scientists at AstraZeneca, Exscientia, and the University of Oxford, is launching Dalton into an increasingly crowded market for AI-powered drug discovery toolkits.
DaltonTx will jostle for position off with rivals like Recursion Pharma, Insilico Medicine, and Schrödinger, as well as tech heavyweights such as NVIDIA, Alphabet/Isomorphic Labs, OpenAI, and Amazon, but reckons the strong biopharma heritage it brings to bear and a focus on enablement – rather than an in-house pipeline of therapies – could help it carve out a share of the market.
Another key differentiator is data privacy, with data and models for a project kept separate so that the information is not used to train models being developed elsewhere.
"We believe that the organisations capturing the most value from AI will be those that connect their teams, tools and data into systems that improve real-world discovery decisions," said Garry Pairaudeau, DaltonTx's co-founder and chief executive, who spent 20 years in AZ's R&D operations and was also chief technology officer at Exscientia before its merger with Recursion in 2024.
"Our Dalton drug discovery platform unifies data, models, and experimental results to capture what worked, what failed and why, with full context, so judgement compounds over time," added Pairaudeau, who sees the role of Dalton as "supercharging" rather than replacing human expertise and building "organisational memory."
Sygnature Discovery joins the platform
In another major development for DaltonTx, contract research organisation (CRO) Sygnature Discovery has signed up to use Dalton to strengthen its AI-enabled drug discovery capabilities, putting the new platform in front of its customers.
"We are excited to be working with DaltonTx and see how they can help scientists make better-informed decisions earlier in the discovery process," said Sygnature CEO Simon Hirst, who added that the platform will help it to "reduce the number of compounds synthesised and tested, shorten DMTA [design-make-test-analyse] cycles and accelerate progression toward candidate selection."
