Introducing Manas AI: Disrupting Drug Discovery

Today marks a significant milestone toward a future where AI and human ingenuity combine to defeat our most devastating diseases. We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Manas AI, a company we’ve co-founded to rapidly expand our capacity to discover and develop life-saving medicines.

Throughout our careers, we have always seen technological innovation as one of humanity's best levers for improving human flourishing at scale. In the domain of health care, we can now help the world's best drug development scientists to augment and amplify their expertise using AI. Through this combination of synthetic intelligence and human expertise, we can accelerate medical breakthroughs that have the potential to change the lives of millions of people.

Picture Nobel laureates, National Academy members, and pioneering researchers who've dedicated their lives to understanding disease  working hand-in-hand with advanced AI systems, exploring chemical spaces and analyzing molecular interactions at speeds 100 times faster than traditional methods. These brilliant minds aren't being replaced by AI – they're being empowered by it.

We believe this approach can shift drug discovery from a decade-long process to one that takes a few years; bringing life-saving treatments to patients years faster than ever before. Every day saved in drug discovery is a day closer to helping someone fighting cancer or living with a rare disease. By combining human intuition with AI's pattern-recognition capabilities, we're not just making drug discovery faster – we're making it smarter and more likely to succeed.

We’re particularly excited about our Project Cosmos initiative, which aims to map the fundamental "rules" of drug binding. This is exactly the kind of ambitious, transformative project that becomes possible when you bring together the right mix of human expertise and artificial intelligence.

Like many of you, we’ve both had people close to us affected by cancer and other diseases. When we first discussed creating Manas we shared a vision of a future where breakthrough treatments don't take decades to develop. Where AI helps us explore possibilities that human researchers alone might never have time to investigate. Where technology serves as a force multiplier for human ingenuity.

We're starting with a focus on aggressive cancers like triple-negative breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma, but our ambitions extend far beyond. This is just the beginning of a journey to reshape how we discover and develop medicines.

Our partners on this journey include General Catalyst, Greylock, and other strategic investors in life sciences and technology who have contributed $24.6 million in seed funding to initiate our efforts. Manas AI will also use Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure, and draw upon Microsoft’s deep domain knowledge in AI in our efforts to develop novel medicines.
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While we're still in the early stages of contemporary AI development, initiatives like Manas AI show how close we already are to advances that can profoundly change the world. Success in our quest will give thousands of oncologists around the world new therapeutics to combat diseases that have shaped human existence since before recorded history, constraining human possibilities and causing immense suffering and loss. The future of medicine has never held more promise.