We exist to give small biotech teams the same hit-identification speed that large pharma gets from dedicated cheminformatics departments — without a six-figure consulting contract or an eleven-week wait.
Moleculepath Bio is a seed-stage biotech services company based in Boston, MA. We run structure-guided small-molecule hit identification for specialty CROs and mid-size biotech discovery teams who need a validated candidate short-list fast — not a twelve-week engagement with a large CRO.
The idea started with a specific frustration. Emilia Hartwell spent six months as a visiting cheminformatics consultant at a 12-person biotech in Cambridge, MA, watching the lead discovery team wait eleven weeks for a contract CRO to return docking results on a single KRAS G12C target. When the results arrived, 30% of the short-listed candidates were flagged PAINS compounds — a filter the CRO had not run. The team had already started planning synthesis routes.
The bottleneck was not compute or data. It was the absence of an integrated pipeline that connected target preparation, GPU docking, ADMET scoring, and PAINS alerting into one reproducible workflow a small team could hand off and audit. Emilia and co-founder Rafael Matos built that pipeline. They wrapped Schrodinger Glide and OpenEye tools with a custom ML re-ranker, deployed it for two design-partner biotechs in Boston, and returned candidate short-lists in four days instead of eleven weeks. Both partners requested a second campaign immediately.
Moleculepath now delivers a Benchling-native data package as the primary output, focused exclusively on structure-guided small-molecule hit identification for specialty CROs and mid-size biotechs. We are not trying to build a full drug-discovery platform — we are trying to be the most reliable, auditable, and fast hit-ID service a 20-person discovery team can plug into.
reproducible over proprietary
short-list quality over list length
operator experience in the room
no PAINS in the final report
audit trail by default
Every member of the Moleculepath team has worked inside a drug discovery program — as a cheminformatics consultant, a Schrodinger workflow engineer, or a hit-identification biologist. We’d rather have a direct conversation about your target than send you a generic brochure.