Alex Zhavoronkov

Biotech pioneer Alex Zhavoronkov is squarely in the vanguard of those who are taking advantage of the boundless potential of AI for drug discovery. Born in Latvia and based in Boston and Hong Kong, he established his company Insilico Medicine in 2014. Through its Pharma.AI platform, it uses big data analysis and deep learning to find new drug candidates, reducing the average time for drugs to reach preclinical candidate stage down to about 12 to 18 months, compared to two and a half to four years that it typically requires.

Since 2019, the company has also taken the next logical step and started to develop its own medicines. It has developed a suite of promising drug candidates, with the number that have been given investigational new drug authorisation by the US Food and Drug Administration reaching double figures. The star among them is Rentosertib, developed to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which Zhavoronkov has described as “the first fully generative AI drug to reach human clinical trials”.

Insilico reached unicorn status in 2025 with a funding round worth US$123 million. The company’s 14th round of funding, it brought the total amount it has raised up to more than US$500 million.

Zhavoronkov is also the director of the Biogerontology Research Foundation, a think tank specialising in ageing research, and an adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. He is the author of several books and scientific papers, including The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy (2013).