OpenAI has bought Orchestra Bio, a startup that helps drug companies coordinate the long, complicated work of turning a scientific idea into an approved medicine. OpenAI announced the deal on Tuesday, Oct. 20, and says it is bringing Orchestra's team and technology into Rosalind, its set of AI models and tools for biology and medical research. The goal, OpenAI says, is to help scientists make discoveries and get the resulting treatments to patients sooner.
Orchestra makes software where people and AI agents work together on a drug project. An AI agent is AI that can carry out tasks on its own, such as using apps and websites, instead of only answering questions. According to OpenAI, scientists and the managers who run each drug project hand the agents the job of keeping track of studies, which frees them to make decisions and deal with problems before they cause delays. OpenAI gives an example: a failed manufacturing batch can push back the start of a clinical trial, the tests of a new drug in people. Orchestra's agents help the team work out which activities and timelines are affected, gather the relevant information and compare ways to respond, and the people then decide what to do.
OpenAI says a new medicine takes roughly 10 to 15 years on average to go from finding a target, the molecule in the body a drug is meant to act on, to approval in the United States. Besides the science itself, OpenAI says, teams have to coordinate the work across their own departments and outside partners, often using computer systems that don't connect to each other. Orchestra, founded four years ago, says the work spans thousands of decisions, from discovery and early lab testing to manufacturing and testing in people.
Rosalind already includes GPT-Rosalind, an AI model built to help scientists work through biology and chemistry questions, and Rosalind Workbench, a workspace that connects the AI to scientific tools and data. The Workbench is still an early version that OpenAI calls a research preview, and organizations that want to build the GPT-Rosalind model into their own software must first be approved by OpenAI. OpenAI already works with the drug makers Novo Nordisk and Moderna on bringing AI into their research.
Neither company has said what OpenAI paid, when Orchestra's agents will appear inside Rosalind, or whether Orchestra's current customers can keep using its software. Nor is it clear how well the agents work on real drug projects: OpenAI and Orchestra describe what the software is built to do, but neither has shared results.