Reinforces trust and compliance by embedding robust data governance frameworks and ethical AI practices, to responsibly harness data and mitigate future regulatory risks.
Explore how AI-driven approaches enhance high-throughput screening by optimizing DNA-encoded libraries (DEL) for rapid identification of potential drug candidates.
Learn how AI algorithms accelerate the analysis of complex screening data, enabling more efficient lead discovery and targeting of molecular interactions.

Jeremy Disch

Hans Bitter

Christos Nicolaou

Jeff Messer
Discuss how Lab in the Loop is revolutionizing drug discovery by integrating AI with experimental workflows, enhancing speed and accuracy in data collection and analysis.

Generoso Iannicello
Generoso Ianniciello is a strategic leader in life sciences with expertise in multi-omics, diagnostics, biopharma, and platform services. As Chief Business Officer at Anima Biotech, he leads the global strategy for the Biology GPU - a new category in drug discovery infrastructure that connects how AI thinks with how biology works, tackling one of the biggest challenges in the field.
Previously, as CBO at Dante Genomics, he scaled the start-up into a global enterprise with over 200 employees and $100 million in annual revenue. He launched the Dante MyGenome Platform for longevity, personalized medicine, and rare disease diagnostics, and built key partnerships with hospitals, biopharma, and research institutions worldwide.
Anima Biotech
Website: www.animabiotech.com
Anima Biotech has built the biology runtime for AI - the Biology GPU.
The Biology GPU is the infrastructure layer that connects how AI thinks with how biology works. It enables AI models to visually compute inside cells in a closed loop of experimental reasoning, revealing the pathways that drive disease.
Powered by a Visual Biology Model trained on 2B+ proprietary cellular pathway images and technology that directly visualizes biological processes and pathways at AI scale, the Biology GPU runs visual experiments inside cells - identifying which pathways are active, how they interact, and where compounds act.
From pathways to targets, mechanisms to compounds, the Biology GPU transforms discovery into a runtime where AI engages directly with biology across the entire lifecycle.
Validated in 20+ discovery programs and collaborations with AbbVie, Takeda, and Lilly, Anima Biotech is defining the runtime infrastructure for AI in biology.
This session provides the unique opportunity to listen to, and engage with, some of the most innovative AI Drug Discovery and Development start-ups globally. Focusing exclusively on early-stage funding, six startups picked by our esteemed selection committee will take to the stage in front of 100+ potential partners. Through a series of rapid-fire presentations, these pioneers will demonstrate their vision of the future of drug discovery, and how their product, technology, or service fits into it.

Chris Li

Adrian Grzybowski

Rafael Carazo Salas

Kunal Jindal

Daniel Haders, PhD

Sagar Jain

Uli Stilz

John Mayfield

Michaela Tolman
Highlight how digital twins and hybrid ML models (e.g., Bayesian, predictive) enable virtual experimentation and proactive troubleshooting, reducing scale-up failures and supporting more reliable process performance at commercial scale.

Shruti Vij

Maria Florez
Bolsters innovation agility by embedding ML Ops practices, aligning data science and IT workflows to ensure reliable, scalable AI deployments and a culture of continuous improvement.
Active deep learning offers a promising approach for hit discovery starting from limited data by iteratively updating and improving models during screening by applying new data and adapting decisions. Key open questions include how best to explore chemical space, how it compares to non-iterative methods, and how to use it under data scarcity. We present ChemScreener, a multi-task active learning workflow for early drug discovery across large, diverse libraries or chemical spaces. Its Balanced-Ranking acquisition strategy leverages ensemble uncertainty to explore novel chemistry while maintaining hit rate enrichment by prioritizing predicted activity. In five iterative single-dose HTRF screens on WDR5 protein, ChemScreener increased hit rates from 0.49% (primary HTS screen) to 3–10% (average 5.91%; 104 hits from 1,760 compounds). Hits were consolidated, retested with close analogs together in the 269 compounds set and clustered; 44 hit compounds from 81 clusters of 269 compounds set advanced to dose–response and filtered by counter HTRF assays. Over 50% of those with IC50 < 45 μM were validated as WDR5 binders by DSF. We de novo identified three scaffold series and three singleton scaffolds as the hits. Overall, we demonstrated that ChemScreener can accelerate early hit discovery and yield more diverse chemotypes.

Jian Fang
Explore how AI accelerates antibody discovery by enabling de novo design, epitope prediction, and in silico affinity maturation for highly specific, developable therapeutics.
Learn how deep learning and structure-based models optimize antibody stability, immunogenicity and target binding to advance precision biologics.

Petar Pop-Damkov

Eli Bixby
Eli makes sure Cradle's models and algorithms are doing what we think they are doing, and he keeps an eye out for the latest and greatest techniques in the literature. He was previously at Google (Brain, Accelerated Science, Cloud) working on biological sequence design, AutoML, and natural language understanding. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biochemistry

Claudette Fuller

Gevorg Grigoryan
Cradle
Website: www.cradle.bio
Cradle's software helps scientists leverage the latest technological breakthroughs in AI to rewrite biology and unlock new therapeutics, materials, and food sources. Generate novel protein candidates, improve multiple properties simultaneously, and run fewer experiments to create optimized leads.

