Design over discovery.

That’s the tagline Aridni Shah of ImmunitoAI doesn’t want you to glaze over. In drug discovery—where thousands of molecules are screened, tested, and mostly discarded, and where 90% of what does survive eventually fails in clinical trials—Shah and her co-founder Trisha Chatterjee are trying to tilt the odds. Calculatedly, because India punishes this pursuit. Economically, because domestic risk capital won’t touch it.

“In less than five months, in a single shot of design, we were able to get functional drug candidates tested in the lab,” said the 35-year-old Shah. “Globally, this is not something anyone has been able to show commonly. Which is why we say design over discovery—before we even start, we know what the final molecule looks like.”

What ImmunitoAI is attempting is one of the hottest hunts in science right now, with AI talent, compute, and capital floodingFinancial TimesInvestors bet on AI drug discovery despite approval gap in from every direction. Once a backwater, drug discovery has become a coveted frontier. 

Since Google Deepmind’s Alphafold2, which went on to win the Nobel Prize, was released for public research in 2021 and broke open the field, at least 173 AI-discovered drugs have entered clinical trials. The US regulator is playingThe Wall Street JournalFDA Turns to AI to Speed Up Clinical Trials along, too. The Financial Times, citing a UBS report, putsThe Financial TimesInvestors bet on AI drug discovery despite approval gap the global pipeline at 850.

It’s not just financial investors. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI have thrown their hats in. Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman stepped off Microsoft’s board to team upManas AIManas AI Launches to Transform Discovery of Novel Cancer Medicines with oncologist-author Siddhartha Mukherjee on a drug discovery venture. Big pharma is circling. In four years, the field has matured and has been humbledThe Financial TimesWhy is AI struggling to discover new drugs?