ARDD conference takeaways: AI drug discovery delivering, virtual cells still lack dynamic data
MaxUnfried · x · 2026-10-09
Reporting from the Aging Research & Drug Discovery meeting in Boston, the author chaired sessions on pet longevity, AI in drug discovery, and virtual aging cells, with three takeaways:
- Pet longevity is a rising industry embraced by Zoetis, Nestlé Purina, and Dechra, yet only one early-stage fund (AniVC) backs it.
- Eli Lilly, Takeda, and Novo Nordisk are heavily leveraging AI in drug development with real results; agentic AI trained on internal data lakes sparks particular excitement, plus a need for mega-scale biomedical datasets.
- Virtual cells are the right ambition, but current efforts are at best "virtual transcriptomes" — the bottleneck is dynamic, orthogonal-modality data, requiring better measurement technologies.
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