Jay Brooks

When it comes to developing drugs, the human brain is its own worst enemy. Though our pre-frontal cortex – the most complex structure known in nature – has devised countless remedies for the body that keeps it alive, the organ itself is almost impervious to treatment.

The problem is that the filter system that stops toxins passing from the bloodstream into the brain also tends to block the very medicines designed to cure what ails it – from deadly tumours to Azlheimer’s, Parkinson’s and depression. Pharmaceutical companies have been hammering on this door for decades. Now Noor Shaker (pictured, above) wants to make the molecular equivalent of a skeleton key.


As a computer science student at Damascus University, Shaker fell in love with machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. Keen to advance her studies, she left Syria in 2008 to take a series of academic posts in Belgium and Denmark.

Living in Europe with her husband and daughter as civil war engulfed their homeland, Shaker felt called to harness her expertise to help people. She just didn’t know how. “My measure of succeeding was: ‘If I die tomorrow, how many people would remember me?’ I really wanted something that would make a contribution.”

In 2016, Shaker attended Entrepreneur First, the London-based accelerator, where she met Vid Stojevic, a Croatian theoretical physicist. They hit upon the idea of pairing Shaker’s artificial intelligence expertise with Stojevic’s knowledge of quantum physics to build computer models capable of discovering new drugs exponentially faster than mere humans.


As Shaker and Stojevic point out, it takes an average of 15 years and £2.1 billion to bring a new drug to market. They reckon they can cut those numbers in half. Venture capitalists agree. GTN, the startup the duo co-founded last year, announced in May that it had raised £2.1 million.

Shaker, GTN’s chief executive officer, admits she was nervous about sacrificing her comfortable life in Denmark to move to London alone with her four-year-old daughter to chance her arm as a biotech entrepreneur. But she believes her outsider status as a headscarf-wearing Middle Eastern Muslim woman has given her a fierce drive to win: “My default was that I should always fight for what I want.”

With GTN now flush with funds, Shaker is focused on her next goal: developing medicines capable of sailing through the blood-brain barrier and conquering once incurable neurological diseases. “Ultimately, we want machine learning to be able to propose compounds that the chemist wouldn’t have thought of,” Shaker says. “At the end of the day, it could save people’s lives.”