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When it comes to AI in drug development, most of the attention ends up on large pharma companies and the AI startups, such as ourselves, that support them. However, large pharma companies are only one piece of the puzzle. Most revolutionary new medicines begin their lives in small, nimble biotech companies that take risks and explore new biology and new technology faster than pharma companies can. Those biotechs are an essential piece of the innovation ecosystem, and are mostly limited by the availability of extremely talented founders and operators to run them.
At Edison, we are on a mission to prevent or cure all diseases. We use AI to accelerate the entire pipeline of new medicines, from basic discovery to clinical development. We realized early on that it would not be possible to accelerate the process of bringing medicines to patients without also accelerating the pipeline of transformative biotechs taking the earliest risks on new medicines.
To that end, we are announcing today our partnership with Population Health Partners (PHP), a biotech incubator with an outstanding track record of launching successful biotech companies. In partnership with PHP, we will deploy Kosmos fully across PHP’s company creation pipeline to rapidly advance the creation of novel biotechs focused on treating diseases that affect the largest proportion of the population.
PHP is the force behind some of the most consequential biotech companies created in the last decade — including Metsera, the obesity company acquired by Pfizer in a deal worth up to $10 billion, and The Medicines Company, acquired by Novartis for $9.7 billion. PHP has scaled a reliable engine for creating biotechs and advancing medicines to patients. Few teams have built and exited even a single biotech venture at this level, but PHP’s CEO Clive Meanwell and Whit Bernard, Managing Partner at PHP and now CEO of Metsera, have done it together repeatedly.
Repeatability is key. We believe that PHP has a repeatable formula for spinning up new biotechs pursuing innovative medicines, and we believe that we can work with them to scale that formula. By bringing together Population Health Partners’ experience in building successful biotechnology companies and Edison’s best-in-class AI scientist, this partnership will uncover new opportunities, streamline the advancement of drug programs, and make it possible to tackle population-scale problems.
OUR FIRST AREAS OF FOCUS
Over the course of the partnership, we intend to co-build biotechs developing medicines for cardiovascular, inflammatory lung, and gastrointestinal disease. We are starting with an advanced clinical-stage asset in PHP's portfolio with the potential to reach 10% of the world's population.
In this process, we are also building an AI regulatory-authoring workflow, powered by Kosmos and informed by a pioneering approach to the IND submission process developed by PHP. Kosmos will compress the timeline from discovery to IND approval, helping submissions move faster while maintaining the rigor health authorities require.
EVERY DAY IS ACCELERATION DAY
The potential for automation to accelerate drug development is large: drug development today takes a median of 10.5 years from Phase 1 entry to approval, and roughly 14 years from target identification through launch. Regulatory and clinical development are the slowest, most expensive parts of getting a drug to patients. They are also where PHP's data advantage is largest. Much of what PHP has generated — IND filings, toxicology studies, development histories — is data the frontier models have never seen. This creates a real opportunity to train a PHP-specific scientific intelligence that can surface insights no general-purpose model can reach. If successful, the impact goes far beyond making individual programs move faster.
This is one of several partnerships we will be announcing, and it is a model for where we believe medicine is going. We hope to expand this partnership model soon across more biotech incubators. We have a great deal of work ahead, and we are honored to be building alongside some of the most talented drug developers in the field.
