Chai Discovery has announced a strategic collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) to use artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery and engineering of therapeutic antibodies. Under the agreement, BMS will integrate Chai's proprietary molecular folding and de novo design models across its drug discovery portfolio, expanding the use of generative AI to identify and design new biological medicines.
Chai's platform functions as a computer-aided design system for biology, using AI models to predict molecular structures, understand biochemical interactions and design biomolecules with specific properties. Rather than relying primarily on traditional experimental screening of large libraries of potential antibodies, the technology can generate antibody sequences and structures from scratch based on predefined biological and biophysical requirements. The approach could help researchers move from target identification to promising candidates more quickly.
The collaboration is particularly relevant for complex or historically difficult drug targets, including flexible proteins, multi-pass membrane proteins and disease-related epitopes that can be challenging to address using conventional antibody discovery techniques. By modeling interactions at the molecular level, Chai aims to help researchers explore a broader range of potential therapeutic candidates while reducing the number of iterative laboratory experiments required during early discovery.
For Bristol Myers Squibb, integrating the technology across its research portfolio represents another step toward AI-enabled drug discovery systems that continuously incorporate experimental data to improve subsequent predictions and designs. Such models could potentially shorten early discovery timelines, improve candidate quality and enable researchers to investigate targets that previously proved difficult to drug.
The agreement further expands Chai Discovery's presence in the pharmaceutical industry. Founded in 2024 by a team with backgrounds spanning AI and biotechnology, the company has also established commercial and research relationships with major pharmaceutical companies including Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Novartis. The BMS collaboration reflects the broader shift toward foundation models and generative AI as core tools in pharmaceutical research and molecular design.
Click here to read the original news story.
