Alex Beatson
107 posts

Alex Beatson
@AlexBeatson
Co-founder of Axiom - AI for drug toxicity

Chindian dim sum restaurant concept for SF Menu 1) chili crisp papadums 2) mapo paneer 3) hot & sour pani puri 4) claypot goat biriyani 5) Peking duck + scallion aloo parathas 6) butter chicken XLBs 7) black sesame jalebi sundae 8) dan dan chaat noodles Should we do this?



everybody wants to do fun experiments nobody wants to write core infrastructure code




Announcing Axiom: Eliminating drug toxicity, without using animals! Alex Beatson and I founded Axiom a little over over a year ago with the mission of eliminating drug toxicity by replacing traditional experiments, such as animal testing, with AI models. We are excited to announce that we've raised $15M in seed funding from Amplify Partners, Dimension Capital, and Zetta Ventures to get this done. It has been a wild ride since we got started. Within our first year, we've created the world's largest human toxicity dataset, encompassing data on over 100,000 molecules generated through proprietary lab methods combined with 1000s of clinical outcomes structured using LLMs. With this dataset, we trained an AI model which predicts drug-induced liver injury more accurately than traditional physical experiments, addressing a leading cause of clinical failure recently exemplified by Pfizer's discontinued obesity drug. We publicly launched this model at the Society of Toxicology conference in March and the response has been tremendous! We're actively conducting or finalizing pilot studies with diverse partners, including six of the twenty top pharmaceutical companies, a major agrochemicals firm, many biotechnology companies, hedge funds, and strategic partners. We're honored to partner with these insanely great scientists to rigorously assess our AI models and explore how to best integrate them into their drug discovery workflows. The expertise of these scientists is crucial for validating and thoroughly evaluating these new methods. We have multiple publications out already but we plan to share a lot more data from these early pilot studies in the coming months. At the same time, the FDA recently announced plans to phase out animal testing over the next few years, emphasizing that animal studies will become "the exception rather than the norm." The HHS Secretary RFK has said that "they have found AI to be much more precise in identifying the impacts of toxins" on the human body. With our recent progress, Axiom is uniquely positioned to support the FDA and scientific community in realizing this shift. We will eliminate clinical trial failures due to toxicity. And we don't need animals to do it. For more, you can read Andrew Dunn's Endpoints article on Axiom in the comments.


















