South Korea's LG Chem is turning to artificial intelligence in its search for new cancer treatments.
The company said it has signed a deal with LabGenius, a UK-based biotechnology firm, to use the startup's AI-powered platform to speed up cancer drug discovery. According to koreabiomed.com, the goal of the tie-up is to accelerate the often slow and costly process of finding promising drug candidates.
According to the Korea Herald, LG Chem said Thursday that it signed a joint research and license option agreement with LabGenius Therapeutics to develop next-generation cancer drugs. A "license option" arrangement is common in pharmaceutical partnerships: it typically lets one company pursue early research while keeping the right to license the resulting work later, rather than committing to everything up front.
The appeal of AI in drug discovery is straightforward. Designing a new medicine traditionally involves screening enormous numbers of molecular candidates, a process that can take years before anything reaches a lab bench. Companies are betting that machine-learning platforms can narrow that field faster and more cheaply by predicting which candidates are most likely to work.
For LG Chem, best known globally for its chemicals and battery businesses, the deal underscores its continued push into pharmaceuticals and the biotech race. For LabGenius, partnering with a large, established player offers validation and resources to apply its technology at scale.
Why it matters: the partnership is another sign that AI is moving from a buzzword to a working tool inside the pharmaceutical industry, where faster, cheaper drug discovery could eventually shape which cancer treatments reach patients.