Haystack Sciences

Haystack Sciences, founded in 2016 by Richard Edward Watts and Divya Kanichar, operated as a small molecule drug discovery company. The firm was established to develop a proprietary platform for discovering novel treatments for human diseases. Its journey began within the Illumina Accelerator, a program designed to support startups in the genomics industry. This incubation provided a crucial foundation for its early-stage development.

The company's core business centered on its molecular discovery platform, which was engineered to provide a low-cost, high-fidelity method for discriminating molecular binding. This technology also estimated affinity and chemical yield, aiming to streamline the drug discovery process for companies with compelling biological targets. A key component of their technology was the use of DNA-encoded libraries (DELs), which involves synthesizing and analyzing large, diverse combinatorial chemical libraries encoded by unique DNA sequences. Haystack developed a proprietary semi-quantitative screening technology called nDexer™, which generated higher-resolution datasets than conventional methods, enabling the development of more accurate predictive models for small molecule design.

In October 2020, Haystack Sciences was acquired by insitro, a company specializing in machine learning-driven drug discovery. The acquisition was a strategic move for insitro to integrate Haystack's DEL technology to build massive small molecule datasets. These datasets are instrumental in training machine learning models to predict drug activity based on molecular structure, thereby enhancing insitro's in-house drug discovery and development capabilities. Richard E. Watts, the co-founder and CEO of Haystack Sciences, joined insitro as Vice President of High-Throughput Chemistry following the acquisition. Prior to the acquisition, Haystack had secured funding from investors including Illumina, Nimble Ventures, Viking Global Investors, and ShangPharma Innovation.

Keywords: molecular discovery, drug discovery, DNA-encoded libraries, DELs, small molecule therapeutics, machine learning in pharma, high-throughput chemistry, nDexer, insitro, Richard Edward Watts, Divya Kanichar, Illumina Accelerator, chemical libraries, ligand-protein interactions, predictive models, pharmaceutical R&D, life sciences, biotechnology