OpenAI has acquired San Francisco-based startup Orchestra Bio, which develops AI agents that can help pharmaceutical companies advance large-scale R&D projects on schedule. OpenAI announced this news on Tuesday.
OpenAI stated in the announcement: "Our goal is to help scientists make discoveries and to manage the work required to transform these discoveries into treatment options that can benefit patients more quickly."
The team and platform of Orchestra will be merged into Rosalind, which is part of OpenAI's family of AI models and tools aimed at biologists and chemists. OpenAI has not disclosed any financial terms.
OpenAI indicates that it can take a long time for a new drug to go from initial conception to obtaining U.S. approval – up to 15 years at most. According to OpenAI, shortening this timeline by even one month means that a new treatment can benefit patients in need sooner, and it also means that the company can generate cash flow more promptly.
This process is also extremely expensive: OpenAI states that the cost of bringing a approved drug to market can exceed $2.6 billion, and among the candidate drugs that enter human trials, less than 10% will ultimately make it to the pharmacy shelves.
In addition to science itself, OpenAI also indicates that drug development teams must coordinate multiple internal departments as well as external partners, and these systems are often not interconnected with each other. External partners typically include contract research organizations, which are external laboratories hired to conduct research, as well as contract manufacturers responsible for producing experimental drugs.
The AI agent of Orchestra – a software that can automatically monitor tasks and flag issues – will determine which activities and deadlines are affected, collect relevant information, and compare different approaches, while scientists and project leaders make the final decisions.
Orchestra was established in the fall of 2022. According to data from Caplight, the company has received seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Definition Capital, Insight Partners, and 8VC, with a total financing of approximately 20 million US dollars. This company should not be confused with the unrelated Nasdaq-listed medical device manufacturer Orchestra BioMed, whose stock code is OBIO.
In April this year, OpenAI launched GPT-Rosalind, a model specifically designed for biology and drug discovery. It is only available to approved corporate clients in the United States, such as Amgen and Moderna. The complementary product Rosalind Workbench connects this model with scientific tools and data, assisting researchers in analyzing results and planning experiments.
Rosalind helps scientists decide what to test; Orchestra is aimed at handling the subsequent steps. OpenAI indicates that the combined team will create an agent that can link scientific discoveries with subsequent decision-making and follow-up research, in order to transform promising results into actual drugs.
In January alone, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, which allows users to connect their medical records to chatbots; at the same time, they also acquired the record-keeping startup Torch for a reported transaction amount of $100 million to improve this product. In the same month, OpenAI transformed another acquisition – a scientific writing tool called Crixet – into a Prism platform aimed at researchers.
OpenAI has always made it clear that it hopes to obtain more than just subscription fees from the scientific community. OpenAI, the Chief Financial Officer, wrote in a blog post in January that as AI enters fields such as drug discovery, licensing agreements, intellectual property-based agreements, and performance-based pricing will share in the value created. In other words, if OpenAI's tools help to develop a blockbuster drug, the company hopes to get a share of the profits.
OpenAI's closest competitor, Anthropic, is also adopting a similar strategy: in April, the company acquired AI, a biotech startup, for about $400 million, and in June, it launched a research platform called Claude Science. In September, Anthropic stated that its Claude model helped to discover an enzyme system similar to CRISPR, a gene editing tool, which was previously unknown; however, some scientists believe that this discovery has been exaggerated.
OpenAI does not specify the acquisition, Orchestra does not mention how much was paid, nor is it clear when its agent will appear in Rosalind. The last announcement regarding Rosalind was just five days ago, when the company launched a new Rosalind Academic Plan offering up to 30 free spots for eligible American university laboratories, valid for a maximum of 12 months.
