video: The Cambridge headquarters will bring together company leadership in finance, business development, and marketing/communications and serve as a showcase for Insilico’s latest platform and pipeline advances.
Credit: Insilico Medicine
Clinical-stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”) has announced that the Company will move its headquarters from New York to Boston. It will retain an office at The Cure in New York City, but over the next several months the company will consolidate its U.S. staff and expand in Cambridge. It signed a lease to secure space at 1000 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge between Harvard and Kendall Square.
This arrangement coincides with a period of accelerated growth at Insilico – a leader in AI drug discovery, with the first AI-discovered and AI-designed drug in Phase II trials – as it rolls out new advances in its end-to-end generative AI software platform and new milestones in its pipeline of therapeutic assets.
“With its dual focus on technology and biotechnology, Cambridge is the ideal location for Insilico to oversee our operations around the world,” says founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD. “Just a few months ago, Insilico celebrated its 10th anniversary. Looking back - it was an incredible journey, and we discovered and developed many AI methods and software solutions already benefiting mankind. While we assumed a leading position in generative AI software for pharma and in pipeline progress, we continue operating as a startup and setting new trends in our industry. We want to continue maximizing our positive impact on human health and the environment.”
Insilico was founded in 2014 in Baltimore at the Emerging Technology Centers at Johns Hopkins University campus. In June 2021, Deerfield Management was one of the investors backing Insilico’s $225 million Series C Round and, soon after, Insilico established a New York City presence at the Cure building on Park Avenue South — a state-of-the-art 12-story innovation campus developed by Deerfield.
The Cambridge headquarters will bring together company leadership in finance, business development, and marketing/communications and serve as a showcase for Insilico’s latest platform and pipeline advances. The facility will feature a showroom demonstrating the company’s growing and progressing pipeline of therapeutic programs and commercially available Pharma.AI drug discovery environment consisting of the Biology42, Chemistry42, and Medicine42 platforms. Visitors will be able to explore Insilico’s latest solutions in robotics and on-premise confidential computing devices, which will be launched in 2024. The site will be supported by Insilico’s AI team in Montreal, Canada led by Dr. Petrina Kamya, Global Head of AI Platforms and President of Insilico Medicine Canada.
The Company officially took residence in the new headquarters on May 1 and plans to hold an official opening event for press and area partners later this Spring.
“Insilico is on the cutting edge of AI for innovation,” says Keith Mikule, PhD, VP of Business Development at Insilico Medicine, who is based in Boston. “This move will allow us to contribute to the vibrant ecosystem in and around Cambridge, whether in advancing AI-designed therapeutics or providing our AI solutions to enable other companies to accelerate their R&D efforts. Most of the drugs in Insilico’s pipeline are either potentially first-in-class or best-in-class and I look forward to discussing these in our new facility in Cambridge”.
Insilico is a pioneer in using generative AI for drug discovery and development. The Company first described the concept of using generative AI for the design of novel molecules in a peer-reviewed journal in 2016. Then, Insilico developed and validated multiple approaches and features for its generative adversarial network (GAN)-based AI platform and integrated those algorithms into the commercially available Pharma.AI platform, which includes generative biology, chemistry, and medicine and has been used to produce a robust pipeline of promising therapeutic assets in multiple disease areas, including fibrosis, cancer, immunology and aging-related disease, a number of which have been licensed. Since 2021, Insilico has nominated 18 preclinical candidates in its comprehensive portfolio of over 30 assets and has advanced six pipelines to the clinical stage. In March 2024, the Company published a paper in Nature Biotechnology that discloses the raw experimental data and the preclinical and clinical evaluation of its lead drug – a potentially first-in-class TNIK inhibitor for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis discovered and designed using generative AI currently in Phase II trials with patients.
About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine, a global clinical-stage biotechnology company powered by generative AI, connects biology, chemistry, and clinical trial analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques for novel target discovery and generating novel molecular structures with desired properties. Insilico Medicine is developing breakthrough solutions to discover and develop innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system diseases, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and aging-related diseases. www.insilico.com