Symbiotic.blue puts Oxford and Cambridge skills into one techbio
Newly-launched biotech Symbiotic.blue is building an AI-driven drug discovery (AIDD) platform using Oxford and Cambridge scientists and life sciences entrepreneurs.
The UK’s newest techbio aims to create smarter, multi-targeted therapeutics to tackle complex diseases by combining the power of generative AI with brain-inspired methodologies.
Leveraging differentiated multi-modal data, Symbiotic.blue is developing a platform and therapeutic pipeline in parallel, initally with obesity, prioritising clinical validation.
Founded by world-renowned academics from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and life sciences entrepreneurs, Symbiotic.blue is raising a pre-seed round for its proprietary platform and early-stage discovery programs.
At the scientific core are three leading academics:
- Professor Gonçalo Bernardes, co-founder & chair of the advisory board (drug development) – Cambridge chemical biologist and global leader in targeted drug design
- Dr Simon Stringer, co-founder & chief AI officer – Oxford theoretical neuroscientist and pioneer in brain-inspired computational models
- Professor Ana Domingos, co-founder & advisor – Oxford expert in obesity and metabolic biology.
Dr Kam Pooni, co-founder and CEO Symbiotic.blue, said: “We’re combining the agility of pharmaceutical leadership with the intellectual firepower of top-tier academic minds in AI and drug discovery. We’re not just accelerating discovery; we’re rethinking its foundations from the ground up.”
Symbiotic.blue was born from a shared frustration: drug discovery was stuck – too slow, too narrow, and unfit for complex diseases like obesity.
Dr Stringer’s breakthroughs in brain-inspired AI offered a new path – one where machines could model biological nuance, not just process data. Profs Domingos and Bernardes brought deep insights into metabolic biology and chemical design, and the spark turned into a plan. Dr Pooni joined to translate cutting-edge science into a scalable company, while industry veterans Nigel Brooksby and Rakesh Roshan brought the strategic firepower to make it real. Together, they founded Symbiotic.blue to break the mould and rebuild drug discovery from the ground up – smarter, faster, and biologically aligned.
Symbiotic.blue’s platform will integrate two novel technologies: Hierarchical Feature Binding (HFB), in which Dr Stringer has been a key innovator, is inspired by how the human brain processes complex information, enabling AI to model biology in a more contextual, layered way. This will be combined with Unimolecular Polypharmacy (UniMP), a technology designed to generate molecules that can simultaneously act on multiple biological targets, increasing potential efficacy and reducing development risk, in which Profs Domingos and Bernardes are experts.
Dr Stringer said: “We’re enhancing generative AI to build the next generation of drug discovery platforms. By mimicking how the brain binds features hierarchically and combining that with Ana’s expertise in metabolic biology and Gonçalo’s deep understanding of chemical drug design we aim to build a system that can better model biological complexity and help identify multi-target molecules with real therapeutic potential.”
Nigel Brooksby, co-founder and chairman (and former chairman & managing director of Sanofi) said: “AI and life sciences are priority areas for investment by the UK Government, aimed to turbocharge growth in the economy. By combining the UK’s world-leading strengths in both AI and life sciences, with private capital and governmental support initiatives, Symbiotic.blue aims to develop a transformative AI-driven drug discovery platform to increase the speed and efficiency and reduce the cost of discovering new therapeutics to address major health challenges.
“Our goal is to build an AI platform that is purposefully different by design, that mimics biology to fast-track the path to novel therapeutics.”
