Viva Biotech unveiled its advanced AI-Driven Drug Discovery (AIDD) platform at a launch event titled "Enchantment of Drug Discovery" on May 13, 2025. The platform represents a significant advancement in pharmaceutical R&D, promising to dramatically reduce drug development timelines and costs while improving success rates.
Dr. Yue Qian, Executive Director of the AIDD/CADD Platform at Viva Biotech, presented the platform's capabilities, highlighting how it integrates artificial intelligence with the company's 15 years of experience in structure-based drug discovery (SBDD).
Transforming Drug Discovery Through Structural Understanding
The AIDD platform builds on principles similar to those behind AlphaFold3, focusing on atomic-level structural understanding of biological systems. Viva Biotech's approach leverages their established expertise in high-throughput screening, biophysical and biochemical assays, and medicinal chemistry.
"Our AI algorithms are built upon a strong structural foundation," explained Dr. Qian during the presentation. "We integrate data from structural insights, affinity assessments, developability profiles, and real-time wet-lab feedback to create truly intelligent, predictive models."
This integration enables scientists to explore new targets, mechanisms, and modalities with unprecedented precision and speed, fundamentally changing how drug discovery is conducted.
Dramatic Reduction in Development Timelines and Costs
One of the most significant advantages of the AIDD platform is its ability to compress development timelines. Traditional small molecule drug discovery typically requires 2-4 years to advance a candidate to the clinical stage, largely due to sequential optimization processes.
The AI-driven workflow reduces this timeline to under 1-2 years by enabling:
- Virtual screening and de novo design at project initiation
- Rapid iterations of molecular generation and experimental validation within weeks
- Parallel tracking of multiple properties
- AI-guided design-make-test cycles during lead optimization
According to data presented at the launch, this approach is 2-3 times faster than conventional methods and reduces total development costs by 50-70% through the preclinical candidate stage.
Revolutionary Approach to Antibody Discovery
For biologics, Viva Biotech has developed an AI-driven antibody discovery workflow that represents a paradigm shift from traditional methods. Rather than relying on animal immunization or in vitro display techniques, the platform begins with AI-generated antibody sequences—a process that takes less than a week compared to the 2-3 months required for conventional approaches.
"Our data-driven and structure-driven rational designs greatly reduce the total number of sequences to be expressed—down from 10^9 in phage display—and provide the foundation for closed-loop learning," Dr. Qian noted.
The workflow achieves a 400% increase in efficiency compared to traditional methods and offers a success rate exceeding 85% in nominating at least one candidate with desired properties. Dr. Qian highlighted two key advantages of this approach:
- The ability to learn from both positive and negative data points
- Models that extract generalizable patterns, making the process target-independent
Three Core Modules Powering the Platform
The AIDD platform is built around three complementary modules:
V-Scepter: Provides fundamental computational modeling tools, including pocket identification, force field parameterization, molecular docking, and ADMET predictors.
V-Orb: Focuses on understanding biological mechanisms through active-learning augmented virtual screening and molecular dynamics, featuring proprietary Free Energy Perturbation (FEP) calculation suites for various binding types.
V-Mantle: Leverages large language models for feature extraction and downstream tasks, enabling de novo design, complex structure prediction, and comprehensive antibody engineering.
During live demonstrations, the platform showed impressive capabilities, including highly accurate ADMET predictions and enhanced Molecular Dynamics simulations that overcome limitations of traditional computational frameworks.
Bridging Discovery and Development
A particularly valuable aspect of the platform is its ability to connect early discovery with later development stages. "The greatest strength of our approach is the connection we establish between discovery and development," Dr. Qian emphasized. "This enables us to predict PK and PD profiles early on, significantly reducing downstream development risks and accelerating the overall drug development process."
For antibody design specifically, the V-Mantle module implements a comprehensive workflow that includes structure prediction, epitope prediction using large language models, de novo sequence generation, iterative affinity improvement, and developability assessment.
Industry Implications
The launch of Viva Biotech's AIDD platform represents a significant advancement in the application of artificial intelligence to drug discovery. By integrating data, algorithms, molecular structures, biological mechanisms, and both computational and experimental workflows, the platform is poised to transform pharmaceutical R&D.
Industry experts attending the event noted that such comprehensive AI-driven approaches could help address the productivity challenges that have long plagued drug development, potentially leading to more efficient discovery of novel therapeutics for unmet medical needs.
As Dr. Qian concluded, "By uniting cutting-edge computational modeling with rigorous experimental validation, our AI platform is transforming the once-impossible into achievable breakthroughs."
