Insilico Medicine is a drug-discovery company founded in 2014 by Alex Zhavoronkov, with dual headquarters in Boston and Hong Kong. Its stated mission is to “extend healthy productive longevity by transforming drug discovery and development with generative artificial intelligence.” The company was an early mover in applying generative models to pharmaceutical research, with Zhavoronkov publishing on the use of generative adversarial networks for drug design in 2016.
Its commercial product is Pharma.AI, an end-to-end platform built around three engines: PandaOmics, which identifies therapeutic targets and biomarkers from biomedical literature and omics data; Chemistry42, which uses generative models to design novel molecules with desired properties; and inClinico, which tries to predict clinical-trial outcomes. The pitch is to automate the slow, expensive front end of drug discovery - choosing a target and inventing a molecule - and then to triage which candidates are worth taking into the clinic.
Insilico’s most prominent program is INS018_055, a candidate for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis that the company describes as the first drug with both an AI-discovered biological target (the kinase TNIK) and an AI-designed molecule to reach mid-stage human trials. It is the firm’s central proof point that an AI-first pipeline can produce a real clinical candidate, and a closely watched test of whether that approach ultimately yields approved medicines.