PostEra, a Y Combinator W20 company, describes itself as an AI-first biotech. It uses Proton, its AI platform for medicinal chemistry, to accelerate the discovery of new medicines. The company advances an internal pipeline focused on Women's Health and Fertility, and has used Proton to nominate multiple clinical candidates across PMOS and Fertility.
PostEra also advances small molecule programs through partnerships with pharma. The company reports it has closed over $1B in AI partnerships, including 4 multi-year agreements with Pfizer and Amgen. It is also leading an antiviral drug discovery center for pandemic preparedness, funded by one of the largest grants in NIH history.
The company's organizational structure is intentionally minimalist. It favors proportional compensation and internal recognition, including meaningful promotions, and emphasizes cross-disciplinary collaboration aimed at delivering cures to patients.
The open role focuses on developing an agentic research vertical. The hire will use agentic systems to automate the development of mechanistic models for biochemical and physiological processes and to analyse biological data for target validation. Work includes machine learning methods that adapt to new drug discovery problems from limited labeled data, with a particular focus on molecular and tabular in-context learning and foundation models built from PostEra's proprietary multimodal data. Prior drug discovery experience is not required, but candidates should be motivated to learn the domain and work closely with medicinal chemists and computational chemists.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing