[The Business Times] Nasdaq listing awaits Singapore’s US$1.5 billion AI drug-discovery biotech Nanyang Biologics
NYB’s journey to the Nasdaq started seven years ago, not in a laboratory, but in a herb garden.
As a volunteer and donor to Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) community herb garden, NYB co-founder and executive chairman Roland Ong had been harvesting medicinal herbs for a relative with a terminal illness.
He wondered if medicinal plants – some of which had “quite potent” medical uses – could be used to discover modern pharmaceutical drugs. But finding active compounds within traditional herb formulations proved to be difficult. “One herb could contain a few thousand different molecules, but a drug is just one molecule,” he said.
This prompted NYB to turn to AI, developing models to help scientists identify promising molecules for testing, while reducing the time and cost.
