Mind the Byte acquires Intelligent Pharma

Mind the Byte, pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence, cloud and big data for computational drug design, has acquired 100% of Intelligent Pharma, one of the leading companies in Spain in chemoinformatics services for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.

Since their establishment in the Barcelona Science Park, in 2011 and 2007 respectively, both companies have managed to raise 5.8 million euros of public and private capital and positioned themselves at the forefront of the sector.

With this operation -the largest corporate movement registered in the emerging Spanish bioinformatics market- Mind the Byte becomes the leading company at a national level and one of the largest in Europe in applying artificial intelligence to the discovery and development of new medicines.

The terms of the agreement, which have not been made public, include cash and shares. Mind the Byte plans to finance the integration and growth of both companies with a venture round of 3 million euros, one third of the company.

“This operation is part of Mind the Byte’s business plan for the internationalization and growth of the company through strategic acquisitions. The integration of Intelligent Pharma allows us to benefit from its valuable network of contacts, team, technology and offices, while at the same time it increases our market share. Our forecast for 2019 is to reach 2 million euros of turnover,” says Alfons Nonell-Canals, founder and CEO of the company.

Mind the Byte, technological partner of Amazon Web Services since 2013, offers its technology through a SaaS platform (Software as a Service) and scientific consultancy services. In 2015, it opened its first European subsidiary in the Copenhagen Bio Science Park (Denmark) and in 2016 landed in the Japanese market closing a commercial representation deal with the Japanese company Filgen, expecting to invoice 1.2 M euros in 2020.

The acquisition of Intelligent Pharma -with offices in Munich and Heidelberg (Germany), London (United Kingdom) and Alberta (Canada) and customers in over 20 countries worldwide- will allow the Catalan bioinformatics to not only increase its local and global presence and accelerate the innovation of its products, but also to expand its range of services abroad.

“The integration will allow us to complete our portfolio of tools for the design of drugs with the know-how accumulated by Intelligent Pharma after more than 10 years of experience and complementary technologies to those of Mind the Byte, which will be very useful to strengthen our line of business,” says Nonell-Canals.

An emerging market with great potential

Bioinformatics is an emerging science in which computer science and information technologies are applied to the treatment of biological data. Currently, chemoinformatics applied to drug discovery is a fundamental technology in this strategic area and one of the fundamental tools for the R&D process in the pharmaceutical industry, since it allows reducing the time and cost of the drug discovery process and accelerating the time to market of new medicines.

“The time needed to develop a drug can reach 10 or 15 years and a very long-term investment of hundreds of millions of euros. With the help of bioinformatics, we help reduce that time, costs and risk of investment by optimizing the phase of drug discovery. In addition, thanks to the recent agreement with the Swedish Prosilico, now we also advise companies in the preclinical studies phase,” concludes Nonell-Canals.