News Center

Today, XtalPi Inc., a pioneering pharmaceutical technology company powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, announced an AI drug discovery collaboration of up to $250 million in upfront and milestone payments with Eli Lilly and Company. The collaboration will leverage XtalPi's integrated AI capabilities and robotics platform to de novo design and deliver drug candidates for an undisclosed target.

XtalPi has established itself as an industry leader in combining mutually informative AI "dry lab" algorithms with large-scale "wet lab" robotics to empower pharmaceutical innovation. Building upon existing success, XtalPi will work closely with the Lilly team to harness the power of its proven one-stop AI drug discovery solution to deliver a novel compound, which Lilly will pursue in clinical and commercial development.

XtalPi's ID4Inno™ small-molecule drug discovery platform touts a tightly interwoven trifecta of AI, autonomous labs, and expert domain knowledge that can generate and investigate a target-specific mega chemical space and quickly zero in on the most promising lead series. Each group of synthesized molecules is tested using XtalPi's internal biochemical, cellular, pharmacodynamic, and pharmacokinetic assay capabilities, feeding project-specific R&D data into generative AI models in iterative design-make-test-analyze cycles until a candidate with optimal drug properties emerges. 

XtalPi’s fleet of hundreds of autonomous robotic workstations can carry out precise and energy-efficient parallel chemical synthesis and assays 24/7. This high-quality real-world data generated with speed and at scale, combined with over 500 AI models and quantum physics algorithms, continuously enhance XtalPi’s capability to predict and authenticate novel drug candidates with greatly accelerated timeframes and reduced experimental costs.

XtalPi’s AI + robotics platform is supercharging the shift of pharmaceutical R&D from labor-intensive trial-and-error research to a computation and automation-intensive model, empowering scientists to achieve more with less. Serving over 200 pharmaceutical clients and research institutions from around the world, XtalPi is now bringing its proprietary autonomous lab to Cambridge, MA as its drug discovery business continues to grow.

Dr. Jian Ma, CEO of XtalPi, says, "With a closed loop of AI and quantum physics algorithms working in sync with the data factory of large-scale robotics experiments, XtalPi is uniquely equipped to tackle challenging novel targets. We are honored that Lilly has chosen XtalPi’s AI + robotics drug R&D platform as a partner in achieving more fruitful pharmaceutical innovation and bringing much-needed treatments to patients worldwide."