Can AI discover new biology?

It began with an unexpected result in an automated laboratory in Zhangjiang, Shanghai. In traditional drug discovery, laboratory capacity is tightly budgeted, and evaluating unconventional biological ideas is often viewed as an unjustifiable luxury. But when a bundle of in vivo studies we purchased through a contract research organization had more assay capacity than our programs needed, our neuroscience team decided to run a test. We turned to our AI target discovery platform, PandaOmics, to prioritize candidate targets from massive multimodal datasets. To our surprise, the AI surfaced Target Z—an innovative biological protein target our company was already actively developing for an entirely different disease area. The platform linked this familiar protein to pain signaling mechanisms for the first time. Our scientists used this unused assay slot to evaluate a newly designed molecule engineered to interact with the Target Z protein—a chance to ask a new question. When the experimental data came back, one molecule accomplished what was previously thought to be highly improbable: It outperformed morphine in preclinical pain models. That breakthrough led to ISM9528, an oral, brain-…