Investing in High-Impact Drug Leads in the AI Era

JF Formela MD moderated a conversation with Jonathan Carlson MD, PhD, Viswa Colluru PhD, Rajiv Kaul and Al Sandrock MD, PhD on how artificial intelligence is changing drug discovery and how investors should think about the opportunities emerging from new chemistry and new data.

Colluru focused on the enormous amount of useful chemistry that already exists in nature but remains poorly characterized. Enveda uses AI to interpret mass spectrometry data from complex biological samples, treating chemical signals in context much like language models interpret words. That approach is intended to expose drug leads conventional screening may never see.

Carlson brought the academic discovery perspective, while Kaul and Sandrock added the views of capital markets and biotech development. The discussion moved beyond the idea that AI speeds up existing drug discovery. The larger opportunity is expanding the chemical and biological space scientists can interrogate, then determining which discoveries are strong enough to justify clinical development and investment.

One Enveda program has already progressed into the clinic after researchers moved from ethnobotanical observations to a new chemical scaffold and a previously unknown mechanism affecting inflammation. It offered a concrete example of what AI-enabled discovery can look like when computation, biology and drug development stay connected.