Inside Insilico's bid to create the UAE's first homegrown cancer drug

Arabian Business

2 days ago

Clinical-stage biotech company Insilico Medicine recently announced it will attempt to discover the first novel cancer drug developed entirely in the United Arab Emirates with just four scientists and its proprietary AI platform to complete work that traditionally takes hundreds of researchers and years of effort.
The Abu Dhabi-based team aims to identify promising cancer targets, design new molecules, and prepare a complete preclinical data package within 18 months—a process that typically takes pharmaceutical companies three to five years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
'Our Masdar City centre already hosts around 60 AI and biotech specialists. By tasking four of them with a complete end-to-end discovery run, we aim to prove that any GCC nation equipped with cloud compute, wet-lab automation and local talent can create world-class therapeutics,' Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, told Arabian Business.
The initiative represents both a scientific experiment and a geopolitical statement as it has the potential to transform the Middle East's role in global pharmaceutical development while challenging fundamental assumptions about where and how drug discovery can occur in the AI era.
Four scientists, one AI
The team consists of two computational chemists, one medicinal chemist, and one translational biologist – a deliberately lean operation working alongside Insilico's proprietary AI system, Pharma.AI. They are targeting what the company describes as 'medium-novelty and genetically validated synthetic-lethality targets' for solid tumours –essentially, seeking ways to kill cancer cells by exploiting specific genetic vulnerabilities.
In pharmaceutical terms, the team is working at breakneck speed. Their roadmap calls for finalising a biological target by Q3 2025, generating promising molecular structures in under 30 days, and completing the entire preclinical package within 18 months. Traditional drug discovery typically takes three to five years just to reach the preclinical stage.
'Humans still design strategy and verify results, but AI handles the brute-force search, learns from every experiment in real time, and steers us away from dead ends,' explained Zhavoronkov. His description evokes a chess grandmaster working with a silicon partner—humans providing intuition and judgment, the machine crunching through billions of possibilities.
Why the UAE?
The choice of Abu Dhabi might seem puzzling at first. The UAE has invested heavily in healthcare infrastructure, but it remains far from established biotech hubs like Boston, San Francisco, or Cambridge.
For Zhavoronkov, that's precisely the point.
'The reason we chose the UAE is because we already have a base there,' he said, referring to the AI Research and Development Centre that Insilico opened in Masdar City in 2023 with support from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office. 'UAE scientists helped discover a drug but they never tried to take full control over the drug discovery program.'
This initiative – which Zhavoronkov is careful to note is self-funded by Insilico, not UAE government money – is as much about proving a concept as it is about discovering a specific drug. If a small team in Abu Dhabi can successfully identify a viable cancer treatment, it suggests that any country with sufficient computing resources and a small cadre of specialists could potentially develop life-saving medications.
'Not just lucky'
Insilico's approach builds on research dating back to 2016, when the company published one of the first papers describing how generative adversarial networks (GANs) – the same AI architecture later used in image generators like DALL-E – could design novel molecules.
The biotech landscape is littered with AI companies that promised to revolutionise drug discovery but delivered little. Zhavoronkov seems acutely aware of this skepticism.
'Since 2021 we have nominated 22 development candidates, advanced 10 into the clinic, completed four Phase I trials and a Phase IIa – without a single clinical failure,' he said. 'Those numbers convert skepticism into evidence.'
Asked why Insilico has succeeded where others have not, Zhavoronkov pointed to four specific factors: 'Pristine, well-curated data – quantity without quality is noise; a closed experimental loop where every prediction is rapidly tested in-house and fed back to the models; deep integration of AI engineers, biologists and chemists under one roof… and many experimentally-validated AI models that we know worked in real world.'
In an industry where approximately 90 per cent of drug candidates fail during development, Insilico's lead drug, Rentosertib, recently showed positive results in a Phase IIa trial for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (a serious lung disease that causes scarring of the lungs). The company reported that Rentosertib demonstrated favourable safety and tolerability across all dose levels, with promising early efficacy signals after just 12 weeks of treatment.
In January 2025, Nature Biotechnology published a paper detailing Rentosertib's journey from AI algorithms to clinical trials – the first comprehensive account of an AI-discovered and AI-designed drug from initial concept to human testing.
The company is already planning to expand across the Gulf region. Insilico recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Investment and plans to establish an operation in Riyadh by 2026, with partial funding from Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures. The company is also in discussions with Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman about potential expansion.
'If the pilot hits its timelines, we will deploy identical micro-teams across the region, accelerating the sovereign drug-discovery capabilities where it matters most,' Zhavoronkov said.
The bigger picture
Beyond regional implications, Insilico's experiment touches on a profound question: does drug discovery still need massive teams, extensive physical infrastructure, and geographical proximity to traditional biotech clusters?
'The goal is to have multiple AI-originated drugs approved and on pharmacy shelves, with a steady stream of new candidates entering the clinic every year,' he said.
'[For Insilico Medicine,] success looks like regulators, payers and physicians treating AI-designed medicines as the norm – much like jetliners are now designed in silico.'
Alex Aliper, Co-Founder and President of Insilico Medicine, framed the effort in economic terms, suggesting that channelling the Gulf's 'deep technology' investments into 'life-saving medicines offers the fastest way to diversify economies and extend healthy longevity' in the region.