This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The latest company to spin out of a Stanford Medicine lab is a biotech undertaking with 37,000 employees—and none of them are human. There's no lab space, no lunch breaks and no payroll.
It's an artificial intelligence-powered virtual biotech company that's the brainchild of associate professor of biomedical data science James Zou, Ph.D., who is also the principal investigator of a virtual lab that launched in 2025, and graduate student Harrison Zhang. The idea, Zou said, was to build on the virtual lab, in which AI scientists emulate an academic research laboratory. They created an entire company with tens of thousands of AI agents, all trained to support the full pipeline of drug development.
"Our idea was to see how far we could push this. Could we create a biotech company that takes on everything from looking for drug targets all the way to designing clinical trials?" Zou said. "Could we have a fully agentic company that tackles the extremely complex challenges of drug discovery?" One advantage of an AI company is that you can skip the startup phase.
Zou's virtual company more or less mirrors the organizational chart of an established brick-and-mortar biotech: A chief science officer agent leads the research teams, which are broken into multiple specialized divisions that work in parallel to tackle the core elements of drug design, such as identifying molecular targets and designing clinical trials. The resulting effort, while intangible, so far seems powerful. The virtual biotech company has been able to uncover a biological signal that predicts which drug candidates are more likely to succeed and has designed a cancer therapy that a major pharmaceutical company later independently built.
A paper describing the virtual biotech company was published Sept. 17 in Science. Zou is the senior author, and Zhang is the lead author. One of the biggest challenges in drug discovery is determining which molecules are most likely to succeed in clinical trials, Zou said.
"The end-to-end process of a clinical trial can cost tens—sometimes hundreds—of millions of dollars, and it can take many years." If there are hidden biological features that could tip scientists off to a drug's odds of clearing clinical trials, that would be a huge boon to the industry, he added. He sent the virtual biotech agents hunting for any characteristics that might set successful drugs apart. Instead of unleashing a cadre of agents into repositories of scientific literature, Zou took a more meticulous approach, assigning a single agent to analyze a specific clinical trial and retrieve relevant data about safety and effectiveness.
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