Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to improve the discovery process for drugs targeting both aging and individual diseases.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leading clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation artificial intelligence and robotics platforms for drug discovery. He is also the founder of Deep Longevity, Inc, a spin-off of Insilico Medicine developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity servicing healthcare providers and life insurance industry. In 2020 Deep Longevity was acquired by Endurance Longevity (HK: 0575).

Since 2014 he invented critical technologies in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) for the generation of novel molecular structures with the desired properties and generation of synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered the applications of deep learning technologies for the prediction of human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. Under his leadership, Insilico raised over $415 million in multiple rounds from expert investors, opened R&D centers in six countries or regions, partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions, nominated 8 preclinical candidates, and entered human clinical trials with AI-discovered novel target and AI-designed novel molecule.

Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (GPU company acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012 he published over 160 peer-reviewed research papers, and 2 books including “The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy” (Macmillan, 2013). He serves on the advisory or editorial boards of Trends in Molecular Medicine, Aging Research Reviews, Aging, Frontiers in Genetics, and founded and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research, Drug Discovery and AI Forum (9th annual in 2022), the world’s largest event on aging in the pharmaceutical industry. He did his two bachelor degrees at Queen’s University in Canada, masters in biotechnology at Johns Hopkins, and PhD in biophysics at MSU. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.