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argenx will gain early access to Chai’s AI platform to support de novo antibody discovery against therapeutic targets
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chai Discovery, the AI company building a computer-aided design suite for molecules, today announced a collaboration agreement with argenx, a leading immunology innovation company.
The collaboration will see argenx get access to Chai’s AI platform and apply de novo antibody discovery across therapeutic targets.
argenx has built one of biotechnology’s most productive antibody engines, combining deep immunology expertise with a high-powered antibody engineering team. The collaboration will bring Chai’s frontier molecular design capabilities to argenx scientists as they explore how AI can extend their existing expertise and accelerate the discovery of differentiated antibody therapeutics.
“argenx is a great example of the kind of team that can move fast and make real use of frontier AI models: scientifically rigorous, deeply expert and fast-moving,” said Joshua Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai Discovery. “By giving argenx access to Chai’s platform, we see an opportunity to empower their scientists with de novo design for key targets of interest.”
Chai Discovery builds generative AI software that can predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, enabling scientists to design biomolecules with specific functional properties. Its models, which are deployed by the top pharma companies, are designed to help discovery teams move beyond screening and optimization toward high-precision, high quality molecular design.
Chai-2, released in 2025, was the first zero-shot antibody design platform to achieve double-digit experimental hit rates, representing a 100-fold improvement over previous computational approaches. Chai’s latest model, Chai-3, further improves performance across therapeutic binding, hard-to-drug targets, multispecific design, developability and generalization.
“Our innovation model brings together deep disease biology, antibody engineering expertise and rigorous experimentation,” said Peter Ulrichts, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of argenx. “We see AI-driven molecular design as a powerful extension of that approach.”
The collaboration reflects a broader shift in drug discovery as frontier AI models move from research breakthroughs into deployment in real workflows by pioneering pharma companies and biotechs.
About Chai Discovery
Chai Discovery is building a world where new medicines are not found through trial and error, but designed with the precision, speed and scale of modern engineering. Chai’s models are designed to reason about biological structure and function, generate new molecular designs from scratch, and help pharma teams pursue targets that traditional discovery methods have struggled to reach.
Founded in 2024 by Joshua Meier, Jack Dent, Matthew McPartlon and Jacques Boitreaud, Chai Discovery is based in San Francisco, California. With backgrounds spanning OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, molecular design and academic research, the team shares a singular vision: to bring the precision and predictability of engineering to one of the hardest problems in science - better, faster therapeutics, for even the toughest 'undruggable' targets.
Chai Discovery is backed by top investors, including Oak HC/FT, General Catalyst, OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Menlo Ventures and Dimension.