Chai Discovery Collaborates with Lilly TuneLab to Offer AI Capabilities to Select Biotechs

Agreement--Chai’s second with Lilly--enables biotechs in early biologics discovery to evaluate Chai’s miniprotein design suite

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chai Discovery, the AI company engineering models to discover new molecules, today announced that certain Chai Discovery frontier AI model capabilities will be made available to companies participating in the Lilly TuneLab platform.

Lilly TuneLab is a collaborative AI/ML drug discovery platform created by Lilly to provide biotechs companies access to models trained on years of Lilly's proprietary research data.

"Our collaboration with Lilly TuneLab brings important design capabilities to biotech companies working in early discovery,” said Joshua Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai Discovery. “Our latest models can design high-affinity binders to targets that have stumped prior computational approaches, and they can do it in hours, not months.”

Under the agreement, select TuneLab participating companies will be able to access Chai’s miniprotein design suite on a free trial basis.

The program is structured to give discovery scientists a hands-on evaluation of Chai's de novo design capabilities, including the ability to generate in-silico candidates in hours, without the need for traditional library screening. A deployment license is required for further preclinical optimization or testing.

This collaboration follows Chai’s previously announced agreement with Lilly focused on accelerating biologics discovery.

"Lilly TuneLab was built on the premise that the best science happens when researchers have access to the most powerful tools, regardless of where those tools were built," said Aliza Apple, global head of Lilly TuneLab. “Partnering with Chai Discovery to bring their frontier miniprotein design models into the TuneLab ecosystem gives researchers access to design capabilities that simply didn't exist until very recently. This is exactly the kind of external innovation TuneLab was designed to unlock."

Lilly TuneLab is part of Lilly Catalyze360, alongside Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, and Lilly ExploR&D, which together support biotech innovation by providing access to strategic capital, lab space and technology, and research and development capabilities.

About Chai Discovery

Chai Discovery is building a world where new medicines are not found through trial and error, but designed with the precision, speed and scale of modern engineering. Chai’s models are designed to reason about biological structure and function, generate new molecular designs from scratch, and help pharma teams pursue targets that traditional discovery methods have struggled to reach.

Founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier, Jack Dent, Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud, Chai Discovery is based in San Francisco, California. With backgrounds spanning OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, molecular design and academic research, the team shares a singular vision: to bring the precision and predictability of engineering to one of the hardest problems in science - better, faster therapeutics, for even the toughest 'undruggable' conditions.

Chai Discovery is backed by top investors, including Oak HC/FT, General Catalyst, OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Menlo Ventures and Dimension.