Haystack Sciences

Haystack Sciences is an emerging biopharmaceutical company that is positioned at the intersection of three recent technology breakthroughs: • Low cost, high-efficiency “next generation” sequencing (NGS) of DNA, • Very large collections of synthetic drug leads tethered to DNA (DELs), and • Machine learning (ML) applied to pharmaceutical discovery. The company’s core competency lies in the creation and systematic evaluation of DNA-Encoded Libraries (DELs). Haystack’s DELs feature: • Programmed chemistry for ligands (instead of simple recording), • Encoding to enable rapid refinement of chemical properties, and • Drug-like ligands that shorten time-to-market for new targets. In addition, Haystack’s proprietary evaluation platform, nDexer™, enables low-cost, high fidelity discrimination of binding as well as estimations of affinity and chemical yield. With today’s NGS hardware, we produce over a billion data points per week. For active compounds, we quantify affinity at significantly less than $1 per compound. This ultra-high-throughput correlation of chemical structure with protein affinity will allow us to develop a robust machine learning model of ligand protein interactions without complex computational gymnastics. Haystack’s management team includes experienced cofounders with more than 50 years combined experience in pharmaceutical discovery technologies. In addition, Haystack was cofounded by Prof. Scott Pegg, an experienced computational biologist (Gladstone Institute/UCSF) with deep industry experience (Amyris, Impossible Foods).