Foster City-based HIV drug company Gilead Sciences is laying off nearly 150 people, and the job cuts are significant among senior members of the company's management.

Newsletter Signup - Under Article / In Page"*" indicates required fields Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the biotech industry by storm, allowing companies to speed up the drug discovery process while also making it more cost-effective. With so many companies in the industry now embracing the technology, we take a look at 12 AI drug discovery companies. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed AI to be an essential tool in helping to find treatments and vaccines with greater speed and precision. Since then, there have been several drug discovery breakthroughs for AI within the biopharma industry, from helping to quickly and efficiently discover a new antibiotic called abaucin to combat a multi-drug resistant bacteria, to fully discovering and designing a drug that has entered clinical trials. Here are 12 AI drug discovery companies currently making great strides with their technology. Anima Biotech Technology: mRNA biology modulators Disease areas: Immunology, oncology and neuroscienceRecent news: Announced promising preclinical data for lead pulmonary fibrosis candidate Anima Biotech’s AI drug discovery technology is built around its mRNA Lightning.AI platform, which images hundreds of cellular pathways in both healthy and diseased cells to train disease-specific AI models, making use of neural networks to help these models distinguish between healthy and diseased cells and identify dysregulated pathways. These pathways are subsequently analyzed to uncover novel targets backed by experimental validation. Anima currently has 20 preclinical candidates being evaluated for immunology, oncology, and neuroscience indications, with its most advanced candidate indicated for the treatment of lung fibrosis. The company announced in February 2024 that this candidate had shown promising preclinical results and could open up new avenues for treating patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The AI drug discovery company also has ongoing collaborations with several pharma giants. After initially partnering with Eli Lilly in 2018 and Takeda in 2021, its most recent partnership was formed with AbbVie in 2023 for the discovery and development of mRNA biology modulators against oncology and immunology targets. Atomwise Technology: TYK2 inhibitor  Disease area: Autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseasesRecent news: Published results showcasing AtomNet’s ability for drug discoveryAtomwise is leveraging the power of AI in an attempt to revolutionize small molecule drug discovery