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Today, a glance at Israel from three completely different angles: drug discovery, AI-enabled cybersecurity threats, and investor reactions to the political disaster. — Anna
From spatial biology to proteomics
Chipmaker Nvidia invested $50 million into biotech startup Recursion, which now plans to “accelerate [the] development of its AI basis fashions for biology and chemistry,” in response to a press launch.
Recursion CTO Ben Mabey mentioned the corporate aims to build “a definitive foundation model for the drug discovery space.” That’s no simple feat; its CEO Chris Gibson referred to drug discovery as “one of the world’s most difficult challenges.”
However, each Recursion and Nvidia hope AI can assist resolve this problem. “Generative AI is a revolutionary tool to discover new medicines and treatments,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a canned assertion.
Recursion is much from the one firm engaged on this; in May, it acquired two companies within the AI-enabled drug discovery area, Cyclica and Valence. But whereas these three firms are headquartered in North America, I couldn’t assist however discover that a variety of their rivals are based mostly in Israel.
I requested Lior Handelsman and Renana Ashkenazi, two common companions at Israeli VC agency Grove Ventures, why Israel might be an AI-enabled biotech hotbed. They talked about some components I used to be anticipating, similar to tutorial expertise and the entrepreneurial spirit that already turned the nation right into a Startup Nation. But Ashkenazi additionally famous that the profile of biotech founders is altering.
