Ono Pharmaceutical Integrates Phylo’s Agentic AI for Drug Discovery

The collaboration marks a shift for the Japanese company, which is increasingly relying on open innovation to shorten the development timeline for novel compounds. Phylo’s Biomni Lab functions as an integrated environment where scientists delegate end-to-end tasks to AI agents, ranging from synthesizing experimental history to executing computational biology. According to Seishi Katsumata, Ono’s Executive Vice President of Discovery and Research, the platform was selected due to its rapid adoption by internal teams and its ability to maintain scientific rigor while increasing speed.

Phylo CEO Kexin Huang noted that the partnership serves as a testing ground for scaling agentic AI in high-stakes drug discovery. Ono intends to leverage these tools to address unmet medical needs more efficiently, building on a portfolio that already includes the cancer immunotherapy OPDIVO. This integration is part of a broader corporate strategy to modernize R&D through digital transformation, effectively allowing human researchers to spend less time on manual data synthesis and more on high-level strategy.