Biotechnology firm Insilico Medicine said researchers working from its Abu Dhabi facility, together with the emirate’s relatively inexpensive AI compute, discovered a potential non-opioid painkiller. The candidate is the company’s 31st preclinical drug in six years and the second discovery to come from its Abu Dhabi research center.
Insilico reported that the compound was discovered and validated in roughly a year, and the program is being advanced toward human trials by next year. Alex Zhavoronkov, chief executive officer of Insilico Medicine, told Semafor that the drug could be transformative for pain treatment — comparable, in impact, to how GLP-1 drugs changed obesity care — by meeting demand for non-addictive options.
AI to compress drug development timelines
Insilico is among a growing number of pharmaceutical companies using artificial intelligence to shorten drug development, aiming to cut processes that traditionally take nearly a decade down to just a few years. The company said the new pain candidate was found and validated in about a year.
Why Abu Dhabi?
Abu Dhabi is positioning itself to capture a share of this lucrative innovation wave and is spending billions to attract biotechnology firms for cutting-edge research and manufacturing. One major initiative is M42, the Mubadala and G42-backed healthcare company, which has collected and sequenced nearly 1 million genetic samples — including around 100,000 from non-Emiratis — as part of a government-led population-level effort to advance personalized medicine.
Zhavoronkov said the emirate has been effective at attracting technical talent. During the Russia–Ukraine war, the company relocated “top talent” from both countries — as well as from Italy, the UK and Poland — in what he described as record time, with support from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office and the UAE’s minister of AI.
He contrasted that with Hong Kong’s business development agency, which he called “super bureaucratic,” and said hiring in Montreal would take six months. He also said that despite regional instability, he currently feels safer in Abu Dhabi than in Boston or New York and that the company’s UAE operations and plans have not been altered because of the war.
Cost and operational considerations
Zhavoronkov attributed lower computing costs to cheap local energy, and said that even large providers like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services offer substantial discounts for workloads run in Abu Dhabi. He emphasized that a typical drug program consumes “less than three weeks” of computing power and sometimes only a few days.
Abu Dhabi is only one part of the development chain: research work on this program was shared with the company’s Hong Kong team, and Insilico may conduct clinical trials in Australia. If a drug reaches the market — a significant uncertainty given the high failure rate in clinical trials — manufacturing would likely occur in China or India, with Insilico licensing commercial rights to a larger drugmaker.
Financial backdrop and expansion plans
Hong Kong-listed Insilico expects to post its first profit this year after signing research and licensing deals, including a March agreement with Eli Lilly that could be worth up to $2.75 billion. Zhavoronkov noted that in an era of extensive AI spending, investors often expect heavy cash burn as a sign of commitment to AI; he argued that many programs do not actually require vast amounts of compute.
Reuters has reported that Insilico plans to expand its Shanghai research lab as China competes with the West on cost and speed to bring drugs to market.
