Intellicule, a software company whose solutions determine the 3D structures of biomolecules imaged with cryogenic-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), has received a $217,941 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Daisuke Kihara, who leads Intellicule, said the grant will be used to develop software technology that could impact precision medicine.
It will have the potential to accelerate the development of novel drugs by offering precise structural information that can guide the design of molecules with improved efficacy."
Daisuke Kihara, Intellicule
Kihara is a professor of biological sciences and computer science in Purdue University's College of Science. He also is a member of the Purdue Institute for Cancer Research and Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery. Charles Christoffer, senior computational scientist in the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, and Genki Terashi, assistant research scientist in the Department of Biological Sciences, are the other founders.
Drawbacks in using cryo-EM
Kihara said cryo-EM is a widely used experimental technique for determining three-dimensional structures of biological macromolecules like proteins, nucleic acids and ligands including drug molecules.
"Its impact is not confined to academic research alone," he said. "Biotech and pharmaceutical companies have increasingly adopted cryo-EM for its ability to provide detailed structural insights into biological targets."
Kihara said there is a challenge in using cryo-EM for drug discovery: achieving a high resolution better than 3 angstroms (Å) is not always guaranteed.
"When the resolution is worse than 3 Å, ligands may still be visible, but the process of modeling becomes considerably more time-consuming and error-prone," he said. "This underscores the need for advanced software tools that can streamline the modeling process, reduce errors and make cryo-EM more accessible to nonspecialists in drug discovery efforts."
Focus of the NIH-grant-supported project
Kihara said the Phase I SBIR project aims to expand and advance structural modeling and analysis for drug discovery using cryo-EM by utilizing state-of-the-art deep-learning techniques.
"The intellectual merit of this project lies in its methodology, which overcomes the current limitations in biomolecular modeling for cryo-EM data," he said.
Kihara said deep learning is at the core of Intellecule's modeling software.
"Deep learning is a powerful type of artificial intelligence particularly effective in image processing," he said. "In this software, it enables the detection of atoms in low-resolution cryo-EM images, something that would otherwise be extremely difficult to achieve."
Intellicule was formerly known as Molecular Intelligence; the company was launched in summer 2024. The Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization issued the company an exclusive license to sell the software in January 2025.
This work is part of Purdue's One Health initiative, which brings together research on human, animal and plant health.
How cohesin mechanics and nanotracker tech are redefining DNA research