Variant Bio launches AI-powered platform for drug discovery using genetic data

Jan 6 (Reuters) – Variant Bio, a private biotech firm, said on Tuesday it has launched a platform that uses artificial intelligence on genetic data to discover new drug candidates to send into human trials.

Drug developers are increasing adoption of AI for discovery and safety trials to get faster and cheaper results, in line with a push by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to reduce animal testing in the near future.

Variant’s Inference platform uses agentic AI – autonomous AI agents that work with minimal human intervention – to discover drugs by analyzing proprietary and public human genomic data from global studies, along with other large-scale biological datasets.

Separately, the AI discovery company also announced a multi-year research collaboration and license agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim to discover drugs for kidney disease using its Inference platform.

Under the agreement, Variant Bio will receive an upfront payment and will be eligible for potential license and milestone payments totaling over $120 million.

Variant Bio said its Inference platform is now available to research partners and that it has collaborations with several pharmaceutical companies in deals totaling more than $200 million.

Drugmaker Eli Lilly last year also launched an AI and machine learning platform called TuneLab to provide biotech companies access to drug discovery models trained on years of its research data.

Several other drugmakers have also announced collaborations in an effort to share proprietary data for training AI models to assist drug discovery and development.

(Reporting by Sneha S K in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo)