A Cerella pricing guide

AI/ML is a hot topic in drug discovery discourse these days, but you don’t need us to tell you that – it can feel like a job itself to wade through all the content and hype around the various applications and implementations. And where do you even begin to explore what adding these to your toolbox might actually look like?

Which AI platform do you need?

The first thing you’ll need to do is decide what you need to achieve with your software. Want to improve your property prediction? Make new headways into synthesis routes? Or something else entirely?

If you are interested in learning more about AI-guided drug discovery and what value it can add to your projects, this article by Tamsin Mansley, Optibrium’s Head of Application Science, is a good place to start. If you are interested in learning more about what your AI might cost, then read on. In this blog, we’ll discuss pricing in the context of our Cerella platform, but obviously prices will vary depending on the exact software and applications that you need.

What does Optibrium offer?

If you know us at Optibrium, chances are you’ve heard about Cerella at some point over the past couple years. At the broadest level, Cerella is Optibrium’s proven and deployable AI platform, which directly addresses challenges in drug discovery data. It can guide synthesis decisions and experiment prioritisation, maximising ROI of your resources, and empowering teams to:

  • Go from concept to candidate faster
  • Identify better compounds
  • Make informed decisions

More information about how Cerella meets these challenges can be found here.


The next thing to consider is, if it is something that can add value to your project, how much does it cost? Similar to what James Halle, our Chief Commercial Officer, mentioned when discussing drug discovery software costs, it depends on a few things:

Cost consideration 1: Licensing

As you can probably imagine, developing powerful and transformative technology like Cerella requires a significant investment on our part. Engaging in collaborations with partner organisations, supporting internal resources (our scientists/developers), cybersecurity maintenance, and updating and fine-tuning the platform are just some examples of what it takes to field a product like this, and contributes to part of what you pay to license such a platform.

Another part of the licensing structure is the size of your organization. Different organisations have different needs, expectations, priorities, etc., so this also must be taken into consideration.

Cost consideration 2: Data

Beyond the cost in a vacuum of licensing AI-guided drug discovery tools, there are various areas of customisation that will depend on your team’s specific circumstances.

Since Cerella requires access to a data source for model building and updating, one such point of cost variation is data set size. Data sets can get quite big, and storing, handling and processing larger sets requires more of our time and resources. However, these costs must be considered against the overall benefit that larger sets can bring for model training, performance, and ultimately, results.

Cost consideration 3: Deployment

Being that Cerella is a cloud-based deployment, there are considerations that must be made for hosting, computational expense, security, etc.

Different companies also have different levels of integration required with their corporate databases and other platforms within their workflow.

The above requires effort and coordination, and differing levels of complexity can also lead to variations in cost. Learn more about data integration in AI-guided drug discovery from our Director of Implementation, Chris Leeding.

Cost consideration 4: Objectives

Beyond the aforementioned technical aspects, there are science-related considerations to make as well.
Deployments are tailored to your project and organisational objectives, and some of what you want to accomplish may require customised support and expertise from Optibrium’s scientists.

Conclusions – AI pricing

When accounting for all of what we’ve discussed, Cerella’s price tag can get into the $100,000+ ballpark – however, in a case like this, it’s more investment than cost. On our website, we have a case study library of our Cerella collaborations. These include examples where, with Cerella, our collaborators could save multiple times this licensing cost.

I hope you’ve found this example a helpful insight into AI drug discovery cost. If you’re interested, you can find case studies from Cerella users, peer-reviewed publications and methodology details on our Cerella webpage.

More resources on AI-guided discovery