Lila Sciences raises $200M to accelerate autonomous scientific research

Artificial intelligence-powered scientific discovery startup Lila Sciences is the latest company to emerge from Flagship Pioneering Inc.’s biotechnology incubator, and it’s backed by a staggering $200 million in seed funding.

The startup, which aims to leverage powerful AI algorithms to lead autonomous scientific research in various disciplines, said the funding came from Flagship plus investors such as General Catalyst, March Capital, the ARK Venture Fund, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Blue Horizon Advisors, the State of Michigan Retirement System, Modi Ventures and a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Lila Sciences is chasing a dream of “scientific superintelligence,” where powerful and autonomous AI agents will be able to help human scientists formulate ideas and hypotheses, and then design and conduct the experiments required to test them.

According to Chief Executive Geoffrey von Maltzahn, the company needs to solve some hard problems that will allow “AI to autonomously and in a scalable manner run each step, from AI models generating an idea to practicing it with robotics and automation.”

The company is going after what many believe is one of the biggest opportunities for AI, namely accelerating scientific progress by automating discovery and development. By feeding AI models with vast amounts of academic data and scientific research, it’s hoped that they’ll be able to create new drugs to cure diseases, develop new agricultural techniques to feed the world’s growing population, and create new materials that can provide greener energy sources, among other things. The most exciting prospect is that AI promises to do this in a small fraction of the time it would take human scientists.

Flagship said Lila Sciences has already achieved a number of impressive feats across various categories. For instance, it has developed its own large language models with advanced reasoning capabilities, and used them to generate genetic medicine constructs that outperform existing therapeutics. It has also helped to discover and validate hundreds of new antibodies, binders and peptides to aid in that.

Other projects have seen Lila Sciences create new materials that can capture carbon from the atmosphere. In every case, it has tested its ideas and generated physical results in a laboratory within just a few months, accelerating research processes that would normally take human scientists years to achieve when working alone.

The achievements of Lila Sciences and other AI-based science startups suggest that the technology will dramatically accelerate traditional hypothesis-experiment-test cycles. Moreover, some believe AI might one day be able to exceed the imaginative capabilities of the brightest scientists and create entirely new solutions to problems without any human help.

“AI will power the next revolution of this most valuable thing humans ever stumbled across — the scientific method,” Von Maltzahn told the New York Times in an interview.

The claims are impressive, and so is the amount of money Lila Science has attracted, but the company admits that the results of its experiments have not yet been made public, since it has been operating in stealth up until now. What that means is that none of its research has been peer-reviewed by independent academics.

David Baker, a biochemist and director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year, has questioned whether AI will ever be able to create true scientific breakthroughs without any human intervention. He has previously stated that AI is just a tool to aid human-led research.

“More power to them, if they can do it,” Baker told the New York Times. “It seems beyond anything I’m familiar with in scientific discovery.”

Now that it has emerged from stealth, where it operated in secret, Lila Sciences said it intends to be more open about its research, and it will provide its platform and tools to partners across the life sciences and materials research industries.

The company will use the funding to expand its lab space at Flagship’s facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in the next two years will also open new offices in London and San Francisco.

Flagship is one of the most prolific investors in and creators of biotechnology startups, its most famous portfolio company being the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna Inc.

Although it’s excited about Lila Science’s prospects, some of its other portfolio companies have experienced turbulence in recent times. For instance, Omega Therapeutics Inc., which was created by Flagship in partnership with Novo Nordisk A/S, is currently undergoing a complicated restructuring that will see the original company declared bankrupt. Others, including Ring Therapeutics Inc. and Sonata Therapeutics Inc., have both announced layoffs and the departure of their CEOs recently.

Photo: Lila Sciences/New York Times