Garden Launches BLOOM AI Engine to Accelerate IP-Aware Drug Discovery

Key Insights

• Garden has launched BLOOM, a Markush structure search engine that provides AI drug-design teams with near-instant verification of small-molecule intellectual property landscapes during the discovery process.
• The system delivers a 32.44× speed improvement over standard search methods, reducing verification time from 1.491 ms to 0.047 ms per comparison while eliminating false positives that plague legacy approaches.
• BLOOM integrates graph-based reasoning with patent databases to enable real-time go/no-go decisions during ideation, addressing the bottleneck between AI molecule generation and IP diligence verification.

Garden announced the launch of BLOOM (Branching Lookup Optimized for Organic Molecules), a breakthrough Markush structure search engine designed to integrate intellectual property verification directly into AI-driven drug discovery workflows. The system addresses a critical bottleneck in pharmaceutical research where AI models can generate thousands of molecular candidates in minutes, but traditional IP verification processes take weeks to complete.

Revolutionary Speed and Accuracy

BLOOM employs graph-based, agentic traversal technology to compare Markush queries against millions of SMILES strings, delivering unprecedented performance improvements. In benchmark testing, the system achieved an average 32.44× speed improvement over standard core-extraction string search methods, reducing verification time from 1.491 ms to 0.047 ms per comparison.

The engine's advanced algorithms successfully identified correct matches that traditional string methods missed, including a designed single-hit query across a multi-million-record corpus. This capability enables research teams to make go/no-go decisions during the ideation phase rather than waiting weeks for traditional IP clearance processes.

Addressing Legacy System Limitations

Traditional IP verification approaches suffer from high false positive rates due to their inability to handle nuanced bond counts and positioning accurately. BLOOM's graph reasoning technology captures these molecular subtleties at speed, eliminating the time-consuming, atom-by-atom manual checks that have historically slowed drug discovery programs.

The system delivers color-coded mapping that confirms atom- and bond-level compliance, transforming IP verification from a manual bottleneck into an automated, scalable process integrated directly into the design workflow.

Integrated Patent Intelligence

BLOOM connects seamlessly with Garden's comprehensive patent database, ensuring every SMILES match links to underlying patent records. The platform's AI agent can summarize, compare, and help researchers prune result sets, supporting workflows from rapid novelty triage to comprehensive freedom-to-operate analysis alongside model-driven design.

"AI can propose thousands of viable chemistries in minutes. BLOOM closes the loop by telling you what's already fenced off instantly," said Adi Sidapara, founder and CEO of Garden. "You get IP-aware exploration without slowing down discovery."

Technical Innovation for Pharmaceutical R&D

The system's graph-based approach recognizes that small molecular modifications around R-groups can determine patentability. Kavin Sivakumar, Ph.D., Founding ML Researcher at Garden, explained: "Small changes around an R-group can define patentability. BLOOM's graph reasoning captures those subtleties at speed, so IP checks no longer throttle design."

This technological advancement enables pharmaceutical companies to maintain the rapid pace of AI-generated molecular discovery while ensuring legal certainty throughout the research process, potentially accelerating time-to-market for new therapeutic compounds.