Four months after raising its seed round from Hoxton Ventures and dRX Capital, a venture arm of Novartis Pharma AG, Peptone, the molecular computational physics company focused on protein drug discovery and engineering tools, has installed an NVIDIA DGX A100 system at Verne Global’s HPC-optimised data center campus in Keflavik, Iceland. The company also announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to scale its AI-driven protein engineering system in order to meet increasing demand from the protein therapeutics market.
Peptone’s team of physicists, structural biologists, computer engineers and mathematicians, led by physicist and founder Dr. Kamil Tamiola, have spent the past three years developing the foundations of Protein Engineering Operating System (PeOS). In collaboration with NVIDIA, Peptone developed PeOS to handle massively parallel molecular simulations that are orchestrated and supervised by reinforcement learning algorithms. The core functionality of the platform is an automated search for non-obvious protein variants with desirable therapeutic properties and cost-effective manufacturability.
Peptone elected to colocate its new NVIDIA DGX A100 supercomputer at Verne Global’s campus as it is powered by 100 percent renewable energy and, as part of the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Data Centre Program, is optimised to maintain and support high density and HPC applications running on NVIDIA infrastructures.
Dr. Kamil Tamiola, CEO and founder of Peptone, said, “The business of protein therapeutics is a huge industry and as we grow and further develop our supercomputing capacity, we can help make significant progress in bringing sought-after protein-based treatments to market faster. Our collaboration with NVIDIA ensures that we have access to best in-class AI and supercomputing hardware and support. The decision to locate our computing hardware in Verne’s Global facility in Keflavik transpires from our commitment to sustainability and security, as no other Tier-3 facility in this part of the world offers this level of operational resilience and runs on completely renewable energy sources. We are proud to be one of the first startups with our own supercomputing hardware operating on completely renewable energy sources.”
“GPUs are accelerating every phase of drug discovery, and in the early phases of drug development, they can massively reduce the time to market,” said Craig Rhodes, EMEA Industry Lead for Artificial Intelligence Healthcare and Life Science at NVIDIA. “As an NVIDIA Inception member, our acceleration platform for AI startups, Peptone is showing remarkable success in the use of their technology to advance this area of discovery.”
“We’re delighted Peptone has selected Verne Global as its data center partner at this mission-critical moment for the company,” said Dominic Ward, CEO at Verne Global. “Our facility, powered by 100 percent renewable geothermal and hydroelectric energy sources, is optimised for the secure and scalable high intensity computing required by Peptone to successfully meet the growing demands of the protein therapeutics market and accelerate the time to market of protein-based drugs.”
