Uncharted Therapeutics: the Desafía Program startup advancing drug discovery with generative AI

05.05.2025 11:15, Rita Longobardi

Meet Adriel Sosa Marco, Co-Founder of Uncharted Therapeutics. The biotech startup leverages generative AI to accelerate drug discovery, offering experts access to a vast chemical space to identify therapeutic candidates tailored to specific diseases. In May, Adriel and the other nine Desafía Team members will participate in a two-week immersive business program across Zurich, Lausanne, and Bern to establish sustainable growth pathways in Switzerland's innovative ecosystem.

Adriel Sosa is a chemical engineer with a PhD in computational engineering. Since 2022, he has led the research program in AI-driven molecular design at Arquimea Research Center with specific applications to de novo drug design. He is a co-founder of Uncharted Therapeutics, a corporate spin-out aimed at bringing the results of his research to market to assist drug discovery experts around the world to spark their creativity to come up with novel therapeutics. His scientific interests include probabilistic deep learning for molecular design, geometric deep learning, and numerical optimization.

Can you tell us who your product or solution helps, and how?
Drug discovery experts face challenges in developing new drugs for specific diseases, often relying on existing molecule libraries for screening. What if they could specify desired features and receive matching selections? Uncharted offers this by providing access to a vast chemical space through generative AI, processing expert knowledge to accelerate suitable therapeutic candidate identification, while keeping experts in control. Our solution streamlines the drug discovery pipeline, reducing costs and enhancing medicine accessibility.

What market are you addressing and what is the potential of your startup in that market?
We are focused on a B2B model, providing our technology as a SaaS. We provide means to pharma companies regardless of their sizes as well as research centers to leverage the benefits of generative AI in their early drug discovery programs and speed up the time to clinical trials.

What are your team’s key achievements to date?
We are a newborn corporate spin-out that has surged from a consolidated 4-year AI-driven drug discovery research program. A fair share of our funding comes from business angels, showcasing the robustness of our research.

What do you expect from Desafìa, and how will it help you achieve your vision?
Desafía will connect us with key agents in biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry to rapidly refine our solution and achieve product-market fit. Additionally, we aim to initiate conversations with VCs to prepare the ground for funding rounds soon.

Why Switzerland represents a great opportunity for you?
We believe that the Swiss market is particularly favorable for Uncharted Therapeutics due to the country's Health Valley, which hosts several pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Accessing this ecosystem will boost our company’s opportunities to achieve its product-market fit and grow globally.