Excelsior Sciences co-founder and CEO Michael Foley was featured in Drug Discovery & Development, contributing to a wide-ranging look at how artificial intelligence is reshaping the pharmaceutical value chain from early discovery through formulation and manufacturing.
The article captures a pivotal moment for the industry, one where generating AI-driven molecular ideas is no longer the primary challenge. The harder problem is turning those ideas into chemically feasible, synthesizable candidates quickly enough for the algorithms to actually learn. As Foley explains, even with billions of candidate molecules on the table, downstream decision-making remains largely manual, and AI tools still struggle to answer critical questions about ADME and toxicity early enough to matter.
Central to Excelsior Sciences’ approach is the same principle that made AlphaFold transformative. As DeepMind succeeded by representing biological complexity in a structured, machine-readable way, Excelsior’s smart bloccs platform tokenizes complex chemistry at the building-block level, creating a modular chemical language that allows machine learning models to operate within closed-loop environments and learn from automated synthesis and testing in real time.
The piece also features perspectives from Eli Lilly’s chief AI officer, Thomas Fuchs, and Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Anil Kane, painting a broader picture of how the life sciences industry is moving AI from experimentation toward integration across the drug development process.
