Variational AI Inc.'s bread and butter rests in novel drug discovery, specifically using artificial intelligence (AI) to compress the years-long preclinical process to perhaps a single year. But in the midst of a pandemic, even a year might be too long to find a treatment for COVID-19, according to CEO Handol Kim. "Even if we're able to collapse the front end, you still have five or six years of clinical trials and who knows if we need a drug in five or six years for COVID-19?" he said. "We thought, 'Well, the fastest way to do this is repurposing existing drugs.'" The pitch caught the interest of the Digital Technology Supercluster, which last month committed to spending $60 million of its $153 million budget to develop partnerships across its networks to address issues brought on by the pandemic.

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.