10150366ML to accellerate nanorobotics in drug developmentActiveCollaborative R&DInnovate UKA rising class of drugs 'Oligonucleotide Therapeutics'(OTs) offer the potential of treatments tailored to specific genetic sequences of patients, alleviating unique genetic disorders and hard-to-treat diseases. The biggest challenge OTs face is delivery to target tissues in sufficient quantities. To overcome this, developers have implemented complex chemical modifications on first-generation OTs that enhance delivery and performance. Simultaneously, the tools used to track second-generation OTs in the body are impacted by these chemistries, which makes assessing their effectiveness and safety during development difficult and prolonged. Nanovery has built a prototype test 'RNAmeter' based on Nucleic Acid Nanorobotics (NANs) that can measure OTs accurately and easily in a range of bodily fluids and tissues. RNAmeter provides top-level performance in detecting and quantifying all types of OTs, requiring 80% fewer steps and being 75-90% faster. The project will focus on improving the design process for NAN design for OTs, currently conducted by trial-and-error approaches due to their chemical complexity. This will be achieved by: 1\. Generation of training data sets 2\. Predictive model development based on ML approaches 3\. Software engineering to create an integrated computer pipeline for NAN design We aim to reduce turnaround and cost for new NANs for OTs from 12 weeks to 2 weeks. This will allow us to get data to developers faster and service more drug development programmes with RNAmeter for the ultimate benefit of patients.