[Interview] This Vancouver-based Startup Plans To Boost Drug Design With AI

Variational AI is a newly formed artificial intelligence (AI)-driven molecule discovery & drug design startup out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The company has developed Enki, an AI-powered small molecule discovery service. The founders of Variational AI are planning to build on top of their state-of-the-art expertise in machine learning, reflected in more than 40 research publications, including those presented at NIPS/NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, and other top events in the area of artificial intelligence research. The organizing principle of Variational AI is that the exponentially growing cost of drug discovery can only be halted if the pharmaceutical industry shifts the paradigm by which it searches the space of molecules. Variational AI has developed a machine learning algorithm that organizes the full space of 1060 drug-like molecules based upon their pharmacological properties rather than their chemical structure, enabling state-of-the-art QSAR and transformative multi-property inverse QSAR/QSPR.