Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Insilico Medicine, part of the first wave of AI-driven drug discovery and development shops, secured a $110 million megaround at a unicorn valuation for its pipeline of 30 treatment candidates. The clinical-stage startup raised more than $400 million in its first decade and tried twice to go public via the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It let its most recent plans lapse in September. Value Partners Group led the Series E, which was disclosed Wednesday and comes three years after a $60 million Series D . At the time of its HKEX filing last year, CEO Alex Zhavoronkov was the largest shareholder in Insilico, owning 10.32% of shares. Other large owners include Palace Investments, Qiming Venture Partners, Warburg Pincus and Aramco Ventures. The Cambridge, MA-based startup has locations across the globe, including in New York, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Since Insilico’s launch a decade ago, a flurry of other AI-driven biotechs have sprouted up. Some companies have merged, like Recursion and Exscientia. Meanwhile, others are bringing in hefty funding rounds, like Xaira’s $1 billion launch last spring. The biotech said 10 of its 30 assets have gotten clearance for clinical trials. It’s also forged licensing deals with Fosun Pharma, Exelixis and the Menarini Group over the years and inked collaborations with Sanofi, Saudi Aramco and others. Insilico last year presented early Phase 2a data for rentosertib, or ISM001-055, its experimental treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Its pipeline includes programs in pain, obesity, inflammatory diseases, Covid-19, solid tumors and other cancers. The company said it can nominate preclinical candidates in 12 to 18 months, compared to 2.5 years to 4 years for traditional drug discovery. Beyond its pipeline, the company has a proprietary platform called Pharma.AI that uses generative AI, and it’s working on a bipedal humanoid AI scientist in a fully robotic lab.

Artificial intelligences promise to accelerate life sciences research has already drawn billions of dollars of investment in recent years, fueling the rise of companies like Recursion Pharmaceuticals. The latest beneficiary of that interest is Lila Sciences, a Flagship Pioneering-backed startup thats raised $200 million in seed funding.Lilas ambitions match its funding. The company aims to build what it calls scientific superintelligence, an AI platform it contends will be capable of designing and running experiments to accelerate research across every domain of science.Since forming in 2023, the company has tested its platform in a range of disciplines and says it performs at levels that are superior to current benchmarks, whether theyre set by humans or current AI models. As examples, Lila claims its platform discovered and validated hundreds of novel antibodies and peptides, and generated non-platinum group metals that could be used to catalyze production of green hydrogen at a lower cost. It also has developed a specialized large language model that can reason through the scientific process.AI in the life sciences is nothing new, of course. Biotechs such as Recursion and tech giants like Nvidia have shopped machine learning models to life sciences firms, promising to deliver new drug candidates faster than laboratory grunt work by human scientists.Lila is aiming more broadly, taking on what Molly Gibson, an origination partner at Flagship and Lilas president of future science, describes as the long and tedious path of creating a hypothesis, designing an experiment and testing it essentially instantaneously.Though Lilas AI models are designed so far to help with early discovery, Gibson anticipates greater speed early on will have a domino effect across other parts of the drugmaking process that take more time.If we can actually start to encode those in more of the early science, we should be able to speed the process up, she said, such as by increasing the probability of success in clinical trials.Lila will not make its own therapeutic candidates. Instead, the company will partner with other Flagship startups and outside biotech companies to help them speed their research.The company is led by Geoff von Maltzahn, a general partner at Flagship. On its executive team are chief technology officer Andrew Beam, a senior fellow at Flagship; Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI executive turned a senior vice president at Lila and George Church, the renowned geneticist who will serve as its chief scientist.We must solve the hard problems to allow AI to autonomously and in a scalable manner run each step from AI models generating an idea to reducing it to practice with robotics and automation, von Maltzahn said in a statement.Gibson said the companys platform isnt supposed to supplant researchers, though. We're not imagining a world in which humans arent a part of the scientific process, she said.As claims of AIs life sciences potential have grown grander, some in the biotech industry have made the case its impact will be more limited than those investing in the technology say. Problems with the quality and quantity of certain biological data remain, and AIs greatest utility may be as one of many tools biotech scientists use to advance their drug research. Already, the industry has “increasingly outsourced AI development,“ rather than spending money to develop those capabilities in-house, according to Pitchbook.In addition to Flagship, Lila received backing from eight other investors that include General Catalyst, ARK Venture Fund and Altitude Life Science Ventures.Editors note:This article has been corrected to note that Beam came to Lila from Flagship, and Stanley from OpenAI. '

Sanofi threw its support behind Enveda on Wednesday, investing $20 million in the biotech's AI-powered drug discovery platform that draws on a chemical catalogue of molecules produced by living organisms.The fresh capital bumps up the total of Enveda's series C to $150 million; the biotech had announced an initial $130-million tranche in November. Enveda’s platform integrates computational methods with chemical and biological knowledge derived from its searchable database of 38,000 plants linked to 12,000 human diseases and symptoms. By leveraging "nature’s chemical diversity," the company aims to develop new drug classes that offer advantages in safety, efficacy and convenience.Last year, the biotech launched a Phase I safety study of its lead oral candidate, ENV-294, in healthy participants. Enveda is exploring its potential to treat atopic dermatitis, asthma and other immunology and inflammation (I&I) indications.The funding will help Enveda expand its clinical pipeline beyond ENV-294 and fine-tune its AI technologies as it looks to bring about "a new era in metabolite-driven drug development.""We believe that nature holds the key to the next generation of breakthrough medicines, and we are proving that in the clinic," CEO Viswa Colluru said in a company release. "This investment from a global leader in immunology is a testament to the transformative potential of our platform."Sanofi has been a prolific backer of AI technologies in drug discovery and clinical development. Over the past few years, the pharma has forged partnerships with Aqemia, BioMap, Insilico, Exscientia, Formation Bio and OpenAI, among others. Its collaboration with the latter two has already borne fruit; in November, the trio pulled the curtain back on their AI tool, called Muse, that's intended to optimise patient recruitment for clinical trials.The French drugmaker has also forged its own AI Centre of Excellence to "identify, develop and scale innovative solutions, leveraging world-class mentorship from top academics and industry professionals." For more on Sanofi's use of AI, see Vital Signs: Pulling back the curtain on AI in big pharma.