Exonic

Hey YC!

I’m Ben, the founder of Exonic, and I’m building the first drug discovery pipeline open to everyone in the world.

Today, the best biological AI models are open source. But drug discovery is siloed - secretive, adversarial institutions in glass towers.

**Exonic is turning drug discovery into an open, meritocratic tournament.**

Introducing Exonic

We are advised by world leaders in bio AI, including the former Head of AI at Ginkgo Bioworks, and the first author of Evo (cover of Science). 

Exonic provides the latest open-source bio AI models for free in our Studio. With Studio, you can build and share cutting-edge workflows without writing a single line of code.

Using Exonic Studio, we just achieved state-of-the-art synthetic enhancer design in liver cancer (HepG2).

We generated 63 synthetic enhancers and validated them in a panel of cancer cell lines. 6 of our 63 sequences outperform the best known sequences head-to-head in our assay. 62 of 63 enhancers surpass the 99.97th percentile sequence from our benchmark.

More information here: https://www.exonic.ai/media/cre

Exonic Studio is a next-gen synthetic biology engineering platform. We host the most powerful open source AI models (and our own models). And we let users combine them, prompt them, and push their limits in novel, potentially breakthrough ways, without writing a single line of code.

Share and fork complex workflows in our open ecosystem. Run them right from the Explore page — letting you use novel end-to-end workflows for drug discovery, all with a single click.

Soon we will support deeper research, coding, and model training on Exonic.

We are building towards a massive, worldwide collaborative community of AI drug discovery research.

Exonic is flipping biopharma on its head, and turning the internet into a drug discovery powerhouse.

**Our team:**
Chief Scientific Officer
Mikhail Kulak, Ph.D.
Mikhail is a molecular biologist with 20+ years of experience. Trained at Russia’s VECTOR Institute (Ph.D., Molecular Biology), he spent a decade in cancer research at the University of Iowa, rising from PostDoc to Research Assistant Professor. Mikhail led molecular biology at DiaCarta and renegade.bio

Chief Executive Officer
Ben Brimacombe
Ben previously co-founded the AI voice company Free2Grow and grew it to $1.5M ARR. He researched AI at Numerai and Long Run Partners, and has published his work in EMNLP. Ben studied CS and Mathematics at Columbia University.

**Our ask:**
Our first tournament is live! Can you beat Exonic’s synthetic enhancer results?
We are constantly iterating the platform. Give it a try and let us know your feedback!
https://exonic.ai