Salt AI, founded by the high-performance computing (HPC) team behind MySpace, announces its formal research partnership with the Ellison Medical Institute (EMI), led by cancer researcher Dr. David Agus. The joint team is pursuing ambitious milestones in cancer research and novel therapeutic development, building on early progress achieved to date.
This partnership marks Salt AI’s formal entry as a life sciences-dedicated company. In just a few months, this collaboration has already resulted in significant advancements in AI-driven drug discovery—most notably, running AlphaFold2 (a foundation model for predicting protein folding from sequence data) at 22x the speed of commercially available versions. Salt AI is using AlphaFold2 as a validation step after the diffusion model predicts structure and the sequence model predicts amino acid chains.
The team is turning its focus to improve the diffusion model performance next, a notoriously computationally intensive step. Researchers can rely on Salt AI as a life sciences-dedicated AI workflow platform, where models of all sorts (e.g. image, structure, sequence-based) can be trusted to perform at their best.
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Salt AI has the ability to use best-of-breed models to build out AI workflows. New models are continuously under development by the big tech players. Life sciences companies need the capability to use the best models—and to switch without friction when new options hit the market. Additionally, Salt AI’s visualization of workflows enables real-time expert collaboration. Biochemists, oncologists, and executives can engage in the drug discovery workflow at each step.
“Since we met the team almost a year ago, Salt AI’s platform has helped us to innovate at rapid speed in designing new therapeutics for cancer,” said Dr. David Agus, CEO of the Ellison Medical Institute. “By enabling research laboratories access to AI-powered drug design, Salt AI is accelerating timelines and scalability of cancer drug design.”
Through this partnership, Salt AI has been operating a tech-enabled services model. By coupling its software platform with expert HPC services, Salt AI delivers flexible, performance-optimized solutions that free customers to focus on scientific innovation rather than engineering. That offering is now commercially available.
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“We’re taking the same performance and scalability mindset that we brought to platforms like MySpace and applying it to drug discovery,” said Jim Benedetto, Salt AI’s CTO. “This isn’t just about building faster models—it’s about providing a new level of transparency and iteration speed that redefines what’s possible in life sciences.”
Salt AI is already building new use cases including supply chain modeling to improve drug manufacturing efficiency, clinical development applications involving real-world data, and omnichannel analytics for commercialization. By providing a unified AI infrastructure, Salt AI enables pharmaceutical companies to leverage computational power at every stage of the drug development lifecycle, reducing time to market and improving decision-making.
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Source – PR Newswire
