Nvidia-backed AI startup SandboxAQ creates new data to speed up drug discovery – CTV
June 18, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO — SandboxAQ, an artificial intelligence startup spun out of Alphabet’s Google and backed by Nvidia, on Wednesday released a trove of data it hopes will speed up the discovery of new medical treatments by helping scientists understand how drugs stick to proteins.
The goal is to help scientists predict whether a drug will bind to its target in the human body.
But while the data is backed up by real-world scientific experiments, it did not come from a lab. Instead, SandboxAQ, which has raised nearly US$1 billion in venture capital, generated the data using Nvidia’s chips and will feed it back into AI models that it hopes scientists can use to rapidly predict whether a small-molecule pharmaceutical will bind to the protein that researchers are targeting, a key question that must be answered before a drug candidate can move forward.
For example, if a drug is meant to inhibit a biological process like the progression of a disease, scientists can use the tool to predict whether the drug molecule is likely to bind to the proteins involved in that process.
