{"id":69239,"title":"Persist - We build long-lasting drugs 50% faster 💊","tagline":"Drug formulations made by robotics and designed by AI","body":"### **TLDR**\n\nPersist helps pharma make drug injections that last up to 1 year. \n\nUsing robotics \u0026 AI, we reduce a 5-year drug formulation process to \\~2 years.\n\n**Contact Us (**[**founders@persist-ai.com**](mailto:founders@persist-ai.com)**) for a case-study formulation**\n\nTo make injections we encapsulate drugs inside injectable microspheres made with FDA-approved materials.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=69239\u0026key=user_uploads/1094851/19542a20-d5f0-4ccd-9450-d6b8427a6b94)\n\n**_Left:_** _Image of a \\~37 um microsphere made by our robotics_\n\n**_Right:_** _A Schematic showing how encapsulated drugs are released over 1 year so patients don’t take as many injections._\n\n### 🤔**THE PROBLEM**\n\nFor chronic diseases, most patients prefer 1 injection/yr rather than multiple injections per week.\n\nHowever, making a long-lasting injection takes a lot of trial and error and the time between iterations is long.\n\nKey challenges include:\n\n* **Using manual work \u0026 intuition is slow**: Typical teams manually mix and match chemicals to optimize the amount of drug that’s loaded into the spheres and the rate of release of drug\n* **Trial and error is cumbersome:** Because changing one variable may have multiple effects \n* **Scale-up is unpredictable:** Even if something works at a small scale, batch-to-batch consistency during scale-up is uncertain because production is done in large reactors\n\n### 💡**OUR SOLUTION**\n\nWe utilize custom robotics and AI to solve the problems with building microspheres. \n\n* **We automatically mix \u0026 optimize formulations:** We use a closed-loop robotics + AI approach so there’s minimal manual work\n* **We reduce trial \u0026 error with AI predictions:** We generate 50x more data than most formulation teams and use that data to train AI. This unique data enables us to make better predictions than others.\n* **We build small batches, faster:** So we can QC batches more frequently and scale up predictably\n\n### ❤️**OUR ASKS**\n\nIntroduce us to friends who work in Pharma. Email [founders@persist-ai.com](mailto:founders@persist-ai.com) \n\n“Follow” us [on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/persist-ai/)","slug":"I0l-persist-we-build-long-lasting-drugs-50-faster","created_at":"2023-02-13T16:43:58.890Z","updated_at":"2026-05-24T01:04:02.619Z","total_vote_count":36,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/I0l-persist-we-build-long-lasting-drugs-50-faster","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":28112,"name":"Persist AI","slug":"persist-ai","url":"http://www.persist-ai.com","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/eeb1e38a6ca6e6061c101deae73f22c28c142596.png","batch":"Winter 2023","industry":"Healthcare","tags":["Machine Learning","Robotics","Microfluidics","Nanotechnology","Therapeutics"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/28112"}}