Dotmatics aims to speed drug development with Geneious Luma

Even as enterprises across sectors explore how to integrate generative AI, it’s clear that biomedical research and the sciences are among the areas that could benefit most — as highlighted in the recent Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics awarded to AI researchers.

Now Dotmatics, a leader in research and development scientific software, wants to give drug researchers the power of AI to speed up their development of new, life-saving and improving drugs.

Today, the Boston-based company launches Geneious Luma, a powerful new bioinformatics solution for antibody discovery, built on its Luma Scientific Intelligence Platform.

Geneious Luma is designed to streamline the process of biologic therapeutic discovery by integrating advanced sequence analysis, data management, and AI-powered automation. This release marks the first of several multimodal solutions aimed at transforming scientific research and accelerating the discovery of new therapies.

Thomas Swalla, CEO of Dotmatics, explained the benefit of Geneious Luma in a recent video interview with VentureBeat: “The problem we’re solving is that discovering new molecules and drugs has become increasingly complicated. It takes over a decade to bring a drug to market and costs anywhere from two to six billion dollars.”

With Geneious Luma, Dotmatics addresses the challenges of fragmented workflows and siloed data in biologic research.

The platform integrates key tools like Geneious Prime and Geneious Biologics to streamline antibody sequence discovery and protein engineering, from in-silico design to wet-lab experimentation and decision support.

As Swalla noted, “Dotmatics is addressing the fragmentation and complexity of drug discovery. The promise of new therapies, like cell and gene therapies, is tremendous, but the science is really complicated. We’re working to pull all these areas together.”

As such, it goes up against other AI drug discovery platforms such as VeriSIM Life and Platforma.bio, but can also integrate data from them — with the scientist users’ permission, of course.

Antibody research

Dotmatics supports over 2 million scientists and 10,000 customers in 180 countries. Its solutions streamline R&D processes by connecting science, data, and decision-making. Dotmatics’ team of over 850 employees operates globally, with its principal office in Boston.

Geneious Luma builds upon the capabilities of the Luma platform to provide seamless bioinformatics solutions tailored specifically for antibody and protein engineering.

The platform is designed to accelerate workflows across therapeutic modalities, including antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), RNA and gene therapies, and vaccines.

t enables researchers to work more efficiently by automating complex data processes and centralizing all relevant data into a unified workspace.

By incorporating tools like Geneious Prime, which offers industry-leading cloning and sequence analysis, and Geneious Biologics, which enhances antibody sequence discovery, Geneious Luma ensures that researchers have the advanced capabilities needed to tackle the complexities of antibody engineering.

Swalla further emphasized how the platform enhances research efficiency: “With our new product, Luma, you can pull together massive datasets across these fragmented areas of science, putting language models on top of them to speed up the discovery of new molecules and drugs.”

Advances in AI

The flexibility of Geneious Luma is one of its greatest strengths. It leverages AI and machine learning to automate workflows, enabling scientists to manage complex biological data with greater accuracy and speed.

Michael Swartz, Chief Strategy Officer at Dotmatics, told VentureBeat in the same video interview call how the platform adapts to real-time needs: “Our software is able to adapt in near real-time to whatever the scientist decides to do. Luma can call out to external models like [DeepMind’s] AlphaFold to assist, which hasn’t been possible before.”

But that’s just one of many external AI tools and resources that users can pipe into Geneious Luma.

“Today, we enable AI models through Luma, but our customers can pick whichever model they want and put it closest to the data in their life sciences ecosystem,” Swalla clarified. “We know we have to partner with companies that bring models and help with accelerated compute because that’s what will make AI in drug discovery economically feasible.”

In addition to AI-assisted discovery, Geneious Luma incorporates powerful tools like Luma Lab Connect, which automates data ingestion from lab instruments such as flow cytometers and mass spectrometers, allowing researchers to efficiently collect, process, and analyze data from multiple sources.

“When you think about instrument integration, it’s not static,” Swartz explained. “We grab the data off the software and deliver it precisely at the right time and in the right organizational framework, in a frictionless way.”

Solving for siloed data

In the increasingly complex landscape of therapeutic discovery, the ability to manage large and diverse datasets is crucial.

Geneious Luma offers a solution to one of the biggest hurdles in life sciences today—siloed and unstructured data. Swalla commented, “The real issue in life sciences isn’t a lack of AI models; it’s that the data isn’t big enough, structured enough, or trusted enough to train those models. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve with Luma.”

By integrating all the necessary tools and workflows into a single, cohesive platform, Geneious Luma enables researchers to overcome these data challenges, fostering collaboration across teams and speeding up the discovery process.

Beyond antibodies

While the initial focus of Geneious Luma is on antibody and protein engineering, Dotmatics plans to extend the platform’s capabilities into other areas of biologic research, such as CAR-T therapies, CRISPR, and RNA-based medicine.

Swalla sees this as a tremendous opportunity: “In this industry, people are still using paper and pencil, and there are companies that haven’t moved to the cloud. We’re 15 years behind in terms of tech adoption, which is a huge opportunity for us.”

The flexibility of the Geneious Luma platform ensures that it can be adapted for various therapeutic discovery processes, driving efficiency across the industry. Dotmatics is also exploring opportunities to extend the platform into other scientific domains, including material science and agritech.

Geneious Luma is available now as part of the Dotmatics Luma platform, with further enhancements planned for the future. As Dotmatics continues to innovate, the company aims to push the boundaries of drug discovery through integrated bioinformatics and AI-driven research.