AQBioSim

Revolutionizing End-to-End Drug Discovery and Development with Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) 

We are redefining drug discovery with a comprehensive, end-to-end approach powered by Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) derived from AI and physics-based methods. From early-stage research to clinical candidate selection, our process accelerates the development of small molecules and biologics, delivering faster, more accurate solutions to the most challenging problems in drug discovery.

We offer a fully integrated solution that spans the entire drug discovery and development lifecycle, ensuring efficiency and precision at every stage.


We act as your strategic partner, seamlessly integrated into your programs to enhance your ability to generate novel molecular drug IP and clinical assets. Our focus is on optimizing and applying specialized LQM solutions tailored to your specific drug discovery and development needs, while ensuring they are broadly applicable and reusable in future projects, delivering long-term value.

Through a milestone-based project approach, SandboxAQ shares in the risk and incentives to deliver results that matter most to customers.

“My life’s work has been to investigate neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disorders. As my colleagues and I are focused on treatments for these illnesses, I was looking for AI software that could speed up our development time and de-risk the drug candidate before clinical trials. We found SandboxAQ and their software has been transformative for our work. The SandboxAQ LQM for biopharma is an end-to-end solution which is speeding up our research as we move closer to the clinic.

Prior to SandboxAQ, we were only able to explore 250,000 compounds which yielded 25 hits over the course of a year. With SandboxAQ’s platform, we increased the chemical exploration space from 250,000 molecules to 5.6 million. We identified candidate molecules faster and more efficiently with a hit rate 30 times greater. As a scientist, I am deeply impressed with the technical depth and impact of SandboxAQ's AI technology.”

Dr. Stanley Prusiner, Nobel Laureate, UCSF

“We are excited about our partnership with SandboxAQ where we are accelerating drug candidate identification and optimization on novel targets within the Riboscience portfolio. SandboxAQ’s unprecedented large-scale absolute free energy perturbation solution is transforming our virtual screening campaign and allowing us to profile in-silico more than 20,000 ligands per day.

This undruggable protein target has been by far our toughest drug discovery target to date. Having enabled medicinal chemistry on multiple promising starting points is an enormous achievement and extremely exciting.”

Dr. Klaus Klumpp, Co-Founder and President of Riboscience

“We are very interested in the work SandboxAQ is doing to revolutionize drug discovery and development via in-silico simulation of molecular interactions using AI and quantum technologies. SandboxAQ’s leapfrog technology could significantly impact both preclinical and clinical development of drugs, and we look forward to seeing how it could support us in delivering life-changing treatments to patients worldwide, faster”

Paul Hudson, CEO of Sanofi

“SandboxAQ is unique, and the only partner that I’ve seen deliver on first-in-class molecules. Their ability to do meaningful quantum chemistry computation on today’s hardware is critical to the first principles approach that is needed now, both in oncology and other major conditions.”

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Staff Cancer Physician at Columbia University and Pulitzer prize winner

Use Cases

SandboxAQ’s generative chemistry AI designs optimized 3D drug molecules in minutes, transforming drug discovery by unlocking AI-generated therapeutics

SandboxAQ has built IDOLpro, a guided generative chemistry AI that can design novel optimal drug-like molecules. IDOLpro is an LQM trained on a combination of public data as well as physics-based simulations that creates novel drug molecules with both high binding affinity to a target protein and optimized synthetic accessibility. IDOLpro leverages AWS infrastructure, combining diffusion models with multi-objective optimization to guide molecule generation. Using benchmark datasets like CrossDocked and Binding MOAD, the model achieves 3.4x better binding affinity compared to state-of-the-art methods and has, for the first time, generated compounds that outperform even experimentally validated molecules. Each molecule can be generated and refined in minutes on a single GPU, compressing months of drug discovery and underscoring the efficiency and transformative potential of guided, cloud-based AI for accelerated drug design.
[AWS Blog] [Scientific Manuscript]

SandboxAQ’s absolute free energy perturbation solution (AQFEP) revolutionizes drug discovery allowing massively fast & efficient AI-driven chemical space exploration

Structure-based methods have become a cornerstone of modern drug discovery, driving significant advancements in the field. Recent breakthroughs in free energy binding prediction and the integration of AI solutions are reshaping the landscape of medicinal chemistry. As the pharmaceutical industry evolves, the demand for innovative solutions to address long-standing challenges has never been greater. Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) are at the forefront of this transformation, enabling researchers to explore chemical space with unparalleled speed, accuracy, and efficiency. The power of SandboxAQ’s AQFEP, an innovative absolute free energy perturbation solution, lies in its ability to rapidly and cost-effectively explore enormous chemical spaces to select promising ligands (i.e. drugs) for further experimental investigation. Without a reference molecule requirement, AQFEP unlocks first in class molecules in an integrated workflow to efficiently screen large and diverse chemical libraries virtually, combining active learning with a rigorous physics-based scoring function. We validated the performance of the approach in the ranking of structurally related ligands, virtual screening hit rate enrichment, and active learning chemical space exploration. Notably, we have disclosed the largest reported collection of free energy simulations to date, further demonstrating the power of this approach [Scientific Manuscript]. AQFEP is already delivering exceptional results in challenging, historically "undruggable" targets, particularly in neurodegeneration and oncology, where it has shown remarkable success in hit identification and lead optimization.

The SandboxAQ Braintrust

  • Tom Stephenson, Advisor with a focus on growth, technology and go-to-market
  • Joseph Lehár, PhD - Innovator, executive and advisor to biotechs, incubators, and funds
  • Ed Harris, Tech advisor and developer productivity advocate
  • Eric Botto, Entrepreneur and board advisor
  • Dr. Emilio Gallicchio, Levy-Kosminsky Professor of Physical Chemistry at CUNY Brooklyn

Resources