Chugai Pharmaceutical adopts Phylo’s agentic AI platform for drug discovery

JAPAN— Chugai Pharmaceutical has partnered with Phylo to deploy Biomni Lab, an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to support biomedical research, across its drug discovery operations.

The collaboration will give Chugai researchers access to AI-powered capabilities and biomedical resources through a single digital workspace.

The companies aim to address challenges in drug discovery, where scientists often rely on multiple disconnected tools and datasets to analyse information and guide research decisions.

Bringing biomedical data together

According to Phylo, analytical work supporting biomedical research can be slow and fragmented because researchers must navigate different platforms and sources of information.

 This fragmentation can make it difficult to fully use the growing volume of biomedical data available to drug discovery teams.

Under the collaboration, Chugai scientists will use Biomni Lab to bring together AI capabilities and diverse biomedical resources within the company’s research environment.

The platform will allow researchers to work with Chugai’s proprietary data while maintaining the security of the company’s internal environment.

The companies expect the platform to help scientists generate new hypotheses and support research decisions across different stages of the drug discovery process.

Chugai plans to explore Biomni Lab across several research areas, including single-cell analysis, disease biology, human genetics and target evaluation.

Supporting AI-enabled research

Sohei Oyama, head of Chugai’s biological technology department, said the company is looking forward to working with Phylo and evaluating Biomni Lab within its research environment.

“As scientific data continues to grow in scale and complexity, scientists need tools designed for the unique challenges of drug discovery research and capable of connecting insights across diverse sources of knowledge,” Oyama said.

He added that Biomni Lab could help Chugai researchers investigate scientific questions more effectively and support the development of innovative medicines.

Phylo co-founder and chief executive Kexin Huang said the collaboration aligns with the company’s goal of helping biopharmaceutical companies adopt AI across their research operations.

“Our vision is to help biopharma become AI-native, and Biomni Lab is built to make that transition practical for discovery teams today,” Huang said.

He added that Chugai’s established record of research and development innovation provides an opportunity for Phylo to demonstrate how agentic AI can be applied to drug discovery.

Biomni Lab is designed to function as an AI-powered research environment, allowing scientists to interact with biomedical information and use AI agents to support research tasks.

Through the collaboration, Chugai will assess how the platform can connect information from different scientific sources and support researchers working on complex drug discovery questions.