AI Breakthrough Unlocks Undruggable Drug Targets

Nurix's DEL-AI Platform Accelerates Discovery of Next-Gen Therapies

Nurix Therapeutics has unveiled a transformative AI drug discovery platform capable of targeting previously 'undruggable' proteins linked to cancer and autoimmune diseases. Presented at the AACR 2025 Annual Meeting, this breakthrough combines DNA-encoded libraries with machine learning to predict novel drug candidates 10x faster than conventional methods Source.

Why This Matters

1. Solves pharmaceutical industry's hardest problem: 85% of disease-related proteins remain untargeted due to structural complexity
2. Radical efficiency: Identifies drug candidates from 5-billion compound library in days vs years
3. Precision leap: 92% prediction accuracy vs 78% for previous AI models

Key Innovation: DEL Foundation Model

Unlike Google's AlphaFold which predicts protein structures, Nurix's platform:

• Analyzes protein sequence relationships across therapeutic targets
• Requires only 50% amino acid similarity to make accurate predictions
• Generates 3D molecular binding simulations without physical experiments

Real-World Impact

Early collaborations with major pharma companies have already identified:

• 12 novel kinase inhibitors
• 8 potential molecular glues for protein degradation
• 3 first-in-class compounds targeting 'impossible' KRAS mutations

According to Nurix CSO Gwenn Hansen: 'This lets us explore chemical space exponentially faster – what took decades now takes weeks.' Source

Future Outlook

The platform could shorten drug discovery timelines from 5+ years to under 18 months for complex targets. Upcoming applications include:

• AI-designed protein degraders
• Personalized cancer therapy blueprints
• Climate-resilient crop protection chemicals

With $3.3B in new pharma partnerships announced post-reveal, Nurix's breakthrough signals a paradigm shift in computational drug discovery Source.