Ono Pharmaceutical Partners with Phylo to Embed Agentic AI Across Drug Discovery
核心洞察
Ono Pharmaceutical and Phylo announced a collaboration to deploy Biomni Lab, an agentic AI platform, to Ono's drug discovery scientists.
Biomni Lab enables AI agents to collaborate with scientists on end-to-end workflows, from synthesizing experimental history to executing computational biology.
Ono's Executive Vice President Seishi Katsumata emphasized the urgency of accelerating discovery without compromising scientific rigor for patients awaiting new medicines.
OSAKA, Japan and SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (搜索) and Phylo, Inc. (搜索) announced on July 28, 2026, a strategic collaboration that will embed Phylo's agentic artificial intelligence platform, Biomni Lab, directly into the workflows of Ono's drug discovery scientists. The partnership aims to accelerate the translation of research questions into novel therapeutic candidates by pairing Ono's centuries-long scientific expertise with an AI system capable of executing complex, end-to-end biomedical research tasks.
Ono Pharmaceutical, founded in 1717 and headquartered in Osaka, is a research-driven organization known for developing the pioneering cancer immunotherapy OPDIVO® (nivolumab), which has reached millions of patients globally. The company has increasingly oriented its strategy around open innovation, including artificial intelligence, to shorten the path from idea to novel compound and improve both the speed and success rate of discovery.
Phylo's Biomni Lab is described as an Integrated Biology Environment where scientists collaborate with AI agents to complete multifaceted workflows — from synthesizing experimental history and reasoning over internal data to designing experiments and executing computational biology. By incorporating Ono's proprietary discovery expertise and historical data with Biomni Lab's agentic AI platform, the partnership is designed to help scientists move from questions to discoveries in a fraction of the time previously required.
"We believe AI will become a core capability for drug discovery. With patients waiting for new medicines, there is an urgent need to help scientists move faster without compromising scientific rigor," said Seishi Katsumata, Corporate Officer and Executive Vice President of Discovery & Research at Ono. "Biomni Lab stood out because our researchers quickly adopted it and saw its potential to accelerate everyday discovery. We look forward to working with Phylo to explore how agentic AI can help bring new medicines to patients faster."
Kexin Huang, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO of Phylo, highlighted the alignment between the two organizations: "We believe drug discovery can be faster and more efficient with scientists working alongside AI agents. Ono's discovery leadership across oncology, immunology & inflammation, and neurology makes them an ideal partner to demonstrate how this new way of working can accelerate breakthrough research."
The collaboration spans Ono's three core therapeutic areas — oncology, immunology & inflammation, and neurology — all of which represent fields with significant unmet medical need. Through its affiliate Deciphera Pharmaceuticals (搜索), Ono is also accelerating clinical development and commercial operations in the United States and Europe, positioning the Biomni Lab integration to potentially impact global R&D efforts.
The announcement reflects a growing trend in the pharmaceutical industry toward integrating agentic AI — systems capable of autonomous, multi-step reasoning and execution — into early-stage drug discovery. Unlike earlier machine learning tools focused on narrow tasks, agentic AI platforms like Biomni Lab are designed to function as collaborative partners that can reason across disparate data sources, design experiments, and iterate on hypotheses alongside human scientists.