Ana Corrionero and Patricia Alfonso, founders of Enzymlogic: “We want to provide the missing data to artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new drugs with the support of CDTI Innovation and MRR funds”
Developing a new drug remains a long, costly, and high-failure process. Although artificial intelligence promises to speed up the discovery of new drugs, it still needs more accurate information about how proteins actually behave in the body. To respond to this challenge, Enzymlogic was born, a biotechnology company that, with the support of the CDTI Innovation through the NEOTEC and Seal of Excellence programs and the financing of the European MRR funds, has developed KINETIC Finder®, a platform capable of providing kinetic data to select the therapeutic candidates with the highest probability of success.
More than a decade ago, Ana Corrionero and Patricia Alfonso decided to turn their careers around and create a company from which to transfer the knowledge accumulated over the years in the field of research and the pharmaceutical industry. Their experience allowed them to detect one of the main difficulties of developing new treatments. "A drug takes more than a decade and costs more than a billion euros to reach the market. And many drugs with real potential are lost along the way simply because the industry does not have, in time, the information needed to identify them."
That need was the starting point for Enzymlogic, founded in 2013 with a different goal from that of most biotech companies. Instead of developing a new drug, its founders decided to create a technology that would help the pharmaceutical industry make better decisions from the earliest stages of research and avoid prolonged investments in candidates with little chance of success.
Thirteen years later, Enzymlogic serves some of the leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies in Europe, the United States and Asia thanks to two proprietary platforms, KINETIC Finder® and COVALfinder®. “Each drug that we help prioritize before is potentially a treatment that reaches a patient earlier: that is the best proof that this bet has been worth it,” say its founders.
When a static image is no longer enough
One of the great challenges of drug discovery is that many of today’s tools provide a static picture of the interaction between a drug and the protein it acts on. Although this information allows us to know if both molecules can bind, it does not show how this interaction will actually be in the body. Proteins continuously change structure and establish dynamic interactions with therapeutic compounds, which can condition the efficacy and safety of treatments.
Laboratory of Enzymlogic
To capture that information, KINETIC Finder® was born, a platform that measures how that interaction occurs over time. In addition to determining whether they both join, it allows you to know the speed at which they do so, how long they stay together, and how that interaction evolves during the process.
Until a few years ago, obtaining this type of data was a slow and complex process that could scarcely be incorporated into the usual pharmaceutical research programs. Enzymlogic has managed to automate this analysis through mathematical models and its own software capable of processing thousands of compounds every week without renouncing the quality standards required by the industry. “The main innovation of KINETIC Finder® is that it has managed to make accessible, on an industrial scale, a type of information that until now was very difficult to obtain routinely,” they explain.
The data that artificial intelligence needs
Although artificial intelligence can analyze millions of molecules, its models continue to work primarily with information that does not reflect the full complexity of interactions between proteins and drugs. The kinetic data generated by KINETIC Finder® allow us to complete this vision and can help identify differences between patients with different genetic alterations, a relevant step to move towards more personalized treatments.
“That move that AI still can’t read is exactly what KINETIC Finder® and COVALfinder® have been capturing since day one. And with it, something even more valuable: we have shown that kinetic data hide authentic fingerprints capable of distinguishing which drug will work in a patient with a specific mutation. A decisive step towards personalized medicine.”
Decide Before to Reduce the Risk
The aim of Enzymlogic is to provide researchers with information that until now was barely available during the early stages of pharmaceutical development and thus help them make decisions.
The sooner you can identify the compounds that are most likely to be successful, the sooner you can discard those that will be difficult to reach the market, avoiding years of research and a million dollar investment in candidates that will end up failing during clinical trials.
The founders of the company claim that kinetic information ceases to be a data reserved for highly specialized studies to become a common criterion within the programs of discovery of new drugs. “With better data from the start, companies first identify candidates with real options, first discard those who do not have them, and avoid the most expensive blow of all: failure in advanced phases, when almost everything has already been invested.”
In addition to accelerating the development of new treatments, this approach helps boost biomedical innovation (SDG 9), promotes more effective and personalized healthcare (SDG 3) and promotes more efficient research through better use of scientific and technological resources (SDG 12).
The impulse of the CDTI Innovation
Transforming a scientific idea into a technology used by some of the major international pharmaceutical companies requires years of research, validation and industrial development. In that journey, the CDTI Innovation has accompanied the growth of Enzymlogic since its early stages. The first support came through the NEOTEC program, designed to boost the creation of technology-based companies that emerged from scientific knowledge, funding that allowed the development of the first versions of KINETIC finder® when it was still in a high-risk phase.
Subsequently, the project obtained the Seal of Excellence of the European Innovation Council, a recognition that distinguishes the best evaluated proposals within the Horizon 2020 programme. Through the call for the Seal of Excellence and the financing of the European Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (MRR) funds, the CDTI Innovation turned that European validation into a real capacity for development, facilitating that the technology reached the last levels of maturity before its commercialization.
KINETIC Finder® analyzes molecular interaction for the development of new drugs
Thanks to this support, Enzymlogic has brought KINETIC Finder® from a technological maturity level TRL 6 to a TRL 9 and has validated more than two hundred therapeutic targets following the demanding quality standards demanded by the international pharmaceutical industry. “When we look at the trajectory of Enzymlogic, we realize that the CDTI has been present in some of the most important moments of our growth, accompanying us in different stages and adapting to the needs of each of them,” said its founders.
Science, entrepreneurship and female leadership
After thirteen years of experience, Corrionero and Alfonso consider that one of the greatest achievements of Enzymlogic has been to build a team capable of converting scientific research into solutions that already use international reference companies.
At the same time, they claim the need to continue promoting female leadership in the scientific and business field and to facilitate that more women can transform their knowledge into innovation projects.
"Leading a team, explaining a technology to an investor or a customer, implementing a quality system or making strategic decisions are not tasks that move away from the laboratory. On the contrary: they are the ones that often determine that a discovery becomes a useful technology, a sustainable company and, ultimately, a benefit for patients," they conclude.
The Next Generation of Drug Discovery
After the technological development phase, Enzymlogic’s strategy now aims at the international implementation of KINETIC Finder® and integrating it into the platforms used by large contract research organizations and companies specializing in artificial intelligence.
The aim is to combine the predictive ability of AI with experimental data obtained directly in the laboratory to further accelerate the identification of new therapeutic candidates.
“We want to build a collaborative ecosystem that multiplies the impact of technology. We are exploring different formulas, from licensing and technology transfer agreements to the integration of KINETIC Finder® into the services of large CROs, with a very clear objective: that this innovation reaches its maximum potential and can benefit the largest possible number of pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies”, they detail.
CDTI Innovation
The Center for Technological Development and Innovation, CDTI E.P.E. It is the innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, whose objective is the promotion of technological innovation in the business environment. The mission of the CDTI is to ensure that the Spanish business fabric generates and transforms scientific and technical knowledge into globally competitive, sustainable and inclusive growth. In 2025, within the framework of the Strategic Plan 2024-2027, the CDTI provided 2,423 million euros of support to Spanish companies and startups.
More information:
Press Office
press@cdti.es
91-581.55.00
On the Internet
Website: www.cdti.es
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/29815
On X: https://x.com/CDTI_innovacion
On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CDTIoficial
This content is copyright © 2026 CDTI,EPE. The use and reproduction is allowed by citing the source and digital identity of CDTI (@CDTI_innovacion).