Company
A discovery company, built around one loop.
The Origin of Next Generation Medicines. 1859 is named for the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species — a reminder that selection, run many times, beats a single clever guess.
Mission
We are accelerating drug discovery to deliver treatments to patients faster. Our powerful engine integrates combinatorial chemistry, pico-scale activity-based screening, and AI, generating millions of empirical datapoints every week to evolve our models. This enables our biologists and medicinal chemists to discover novel small molecule therapeutics rapidly.
We are a discovery company rather than a software company. The platform exists to produce programmes, and programmes exist to become medicines.
How we work
- Chemistry, biology and machine learning sit in one group, on one data model.
- Measured data outranks predicted data in every decision.
- Programmes are stopped when they fail criteria, not carried for optionality.
- Methods are published, including when they do not work.
- Assay quality is treated as an engineering problem, not a given.
Leadership
1859 employs between 51 and 200 people, drawn from medicinal chemistry, high-throughput screening and machine learning. The company was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in San Diego, California.
Sanket Agrawal
Chief Executive Officer
Joined 1859 as CEO in 2023 to scale the platform into a clinical-stage pipeline.
Dr. Helena Marsh
Chief Scientific Officer
Medicinal chemist. Leads discovery strategy across all programmes.
Sofia Lindqvist
Chief Operating Officer
Built the screening and automation operations that the platform runs on.
Dr. Adaeze Okonjo
Head of Data Science
Structure–activity modelling and the statistical treatment of assay data.
Daniel Reyes
Head of Chemistry
Combinatorial synthesis and library design at plate scale.
Dr. Julia Feldman
Head of Biology
Assay development, target validation and translational biology.
Dr. Robert Whitfield
Head of Platform Engineering
Automation, data capture and the integrity of the experimental record.
Mei Chen
General Counsel
Partnering, intellectual property and regulatory affairs.
Scientific advisory board
Our advisory board meets twice a year and reviews every programme before it advances a stage. Members are independent of the company and hold no operational role.
- Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, research university (United States)
- Professor of Chemical Biology, research university (United Kingdom)
- Former head of discovery, global pharmaceutical company
- Professor of Biostatistics, research university (Switzerland)
Facility
Synthesis, screening and data science are colocated at 11425 Sorrento Valley Road in San Diego, so that a measurement made in the morning is available to the model the same day. Automation is in-house: plate handling, liquid handling and imaging were specified by our own platform team.
Where we work
Discovery sits in one building in San Diego, so that chemistry, screening and data science share a corridor and a data model. Partnering and clinical work are run out of London.
Investors
1859 launched in February 2022 with a $40 million Series A to industrialise new medicine discovery by combining artificial intelligence with empirical screening data at scale. We are backed by life-science and technology investors, and we work with pharmaceutical partners on selected targets.