Excelsior Sciences was featured in BioCentury’s Emerging Company Profile series by Lindsay Martin.
In this in-depth profile, Lindsay explores how Excelsior Sciences is working to transform small molecule drug discovery through its automated, AI-driven platform built around proprietary “smart bloccs”, modular chemical building blocks that create a standardized, machine-readable chemical language.
The article provides valuable insight into Excelsior Sciences’ founding story: how co-founders Michael Foley, Jana Jensen, Martin Burke, and Bartosz Grzybowski are combining the Burke Lab’s pioneering carbon-carbon bond chemistry with generative AI and closed-loop automation to make chemical synthesis faster, and no longer reliant on specialized outsourced chemistry groups.
The piece also explains how Excelsior Sciences’ TIDA boronate building blocks, up to 1,000 times more stable than earlier iterations, underpin a programmable make-test-learn cycle that continuously refines drug-like properties across synthesis, purification, and biological testing. Co-founder and CEO Michael Foley predicts that TIDA boronate is going to become the “start of the show” and will make automation and chemical synthesis more accessible, such that every lab and hospital in the world should be able to make drugs on demand with this approach.
