$14M Compute Time Grant Fuels AI-Driven Drug Discovery at Scripps Research

October 19, 2026
$14M Compute Time Grant Fuels AI-Driven Drug Discovery at Scripps Research
  • A major funding package is aimed at accelerating vaccine, antibody therapy, and small-molecule drug discovery by enabling large-scale AI and computational modeling, with a focus on translating AI-enabled discoveries into patient benefits through expansive computational biology work at Scripps.

  • Professor Stefano Forli’s project targets the dark proteome, simulating thousands of dynamic human proteins to reveal transient, druggable pockets and potential new drug targets.

  • Andrew Ward of Scripps Research notes the collaboration blends world-class science with robust computational infrastructure to shorten the path from discovery to treatment.

  • Jensen Huang of the Huang Foundation emphasizes making powerful computational tools openly available to researchers worldwide to accelerate medicines development and model immune system dynamics and proteome complexity.

  • Collaborations across Scripps labs, including Ward, Parker, and Cravatt, will weave computational models with experimental data to advance translational outcomes, with additional inputs from their labs to enhance AI-driven drug discovery.

  • Antibodies for All, led by Bryan Briney, aims to build a Virtual Germinal Center to simulate antibody mutation, binding, and selection for rapid computer-guided vaccine and therapeutic antibody design.

  • AI breakthroughs are advancing from predicting 3D structures from amino acid sequences to envisioning future models that predict function, identify druggable sites, and link molecular patterns to health conditions.

  • The overarching goal is to move AI from promising demonstrations to reliable, widely usable tools that shorten discovery timelines and improve patient outcomes.

  • Scripps researchers aim to develop scalable datasets to train next-generation AI models and enable rapid testing of vaccines and therapeutics before experimental validation.

  • Scripps Research secured a grant of more than 14 million hours of in-kind compute time from the Huang Foundation, in partnership with CoreWeave and NVIDIA GPUs, to advance AI-powered biomedicine.

Summary based on 2 sources


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