Single 2.6B-parameter model achieves state-of-the-art performance across drug discovery benchmarks while running entirely on private pharmaceutical infrastructure
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Insilico Medicine and Liquid AI today announced a partnership that creates lightweight scientific foundation models for pharmaceutical research. The collaboration has produced LFM2-2.6B-MMAI (v0.2.1), available now – a single checkpoint trained to perform at state-of-the-art levels across multiple drug discovery subdomains, not a patchwork of separate point models.
The partnership tackles a critical challenge facing pharmaceutical companies today: how to harness cutting-edge AI capabilities without sending proprietary molecules, assays, and target data to external cloud services. By combining Liquid AI's efficient LFM architecture with Insilico's MMAI Gym, (a comprehensive training platform with over 1,000 pharmaceutical benchmarks), the work shows that on-premise deployment can deliver competitive results across the full spectrum of drug discovery tasks in a single system.
The model covers the complete discovery loop, spanning property prediction and ADMET endpoints, multi-parameter molecular optimization, target-aware scoring with protein-pocket conditioning, functional group reasoning, and retrosynthesis planning. Training involved approximately 120 billion tokens of pharmaceutical data across over two hundred different tasks.
"With LFM2-2.6B-MMAI, we've shown that efficient architecture design, not just scale, is what makes foundation models practical for the sciences. A single 2.6B-parameter model now matches or outperforms systems ten times its size across the drug discovery pipeline, all on private infrastructure. Our collaboration with Insilico is proof that you can reduce the cost of intelligence while raising the quality bar," says Ramin Hasani, CEO and co-founder of Liquid AI.
At just 2.6B parameters, the model achieves cloud-scale performance while operating entirely on private infrastructure:
- Property Prediction: Outperformed TxGemma-27B, a model more than 10x larger, on 13 of 22 tasks covering pharmacokinetics and toxicology, and achieved state-of-the-art results on three of these tasks when compared to specialist models built for individual tasks
- Molecular Optimization: Reached success rates of up to 98.8% on industry-standard multi-parameter optimization benchmarks (MuMO-Instruct)
- Affinity Prediction: On Insilico's internal benchmark – featuring 2.5M experimental measurements across 689 protein targets – produced better correlation scores than frontier models including GPT-5.1, Claude Opus 4.5, and Grok-4.1
- Chemical Reasoning: Demonstrated strong functional group reasoning capabilities (FGBench) and high-quality single-step retrosynthesis suggestions (ChemCensor metric)
These capabilities unlock immediately useful applications for pharmaceutical companies, particularly in high-frequency ADMET screening, medicinal chemistry-facing lead optimization, and retrosynthesis feasibility assessment that prevents wasted experimental effort.
"We are pleased to collaborate with Liquid AI to develop the next generation of lightweight liquid foundation models capable of performing multiple scientific tasks with state-of-the-art performance across drug discovery benchmarks," says Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine. "Highly-efficient liquid science models will make it easier for more scientists to achieve their goals in order to compress discovery timelines and ultimately help patients."
About Liquid AI: Liquid AI builds Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) based on dynamical systems and signal processing. Founded by researchers from MIT, Liquid AI focuses on AI models that are efficient and can be deployed on-premise or in resource-constrained environments. For more information, visit liquid.ai.
About Insilico Medicine: Insilico Medicine is a clinical-stage biotechnology company using AI for drug development across cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system diseases, and aging-related conditions. The company's AI platform covers target discovery, molecular design, and clinical development. For more information, visit insilico.com.
About MMAI Gym for Science: MMAI Gym for Science is a domain-specific training environment designed to elevate general-purpose and frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) into pharmaceutical-grade engines for drug discovery and development. Developed by Insilico Medicine as a core component of its Pharmaceutical Superintelligence (PSI) roadmap, the Gym utilizes specialized tracks for Chemical Superintelligence (CSI) and Biology/Clinical Superintelligence (BSI) to teach models domain-specific reasoning across medicinal chemistry, biology, and clinical planning.
The curriculum leverages high-quality reasoning datasets and multi-task fine-tuning to achieve up to 10x performance gains on mission-critical R&D tasks compared to baseline models. To ensure robust and reliable performance, all models are evaluated against a rigorous suite of proprietary and public benchmarks which are meticulously cleaned to avoid data leakage between training and test sets. MMAI Gym for Science is offered through flexible membership programs tailored to pharma and biotech companies, AI labs, and cloud providers looking to transform generalist AI into robust scientific specialists. For more information or to explore membership options, please contact mmaigym@insilicomedicine.com.
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Insilico Medicine and Liquid AI Announce Strategic Partnership Delivering Lightweight Scientific Foundation Models for Drug Discovery
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SOMERSET, N.J., March 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Harvest Integrated Research Organization (HiRO), a global contract research organization specializing in strategic planning for clinical development and cross‑border clinical trial solutions and services, concluded a successful presence at the 44th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
HiRO's Founder and CEO, Dr. Karen Chu, was a featured speaker at RESI JPM, where she moderated a panel convening investors and strategics at the forefront of the cell and gene therapy revolution. Panelists Robert Balfour of ALSA Ventures and Bettina Ernst of BERNINA BioInvest highlighted the current momentum in cell and gene therapies, discussed how they assess technical and commercial risk, identified partnership models that accelerate progress, and outlined where capital is flowing in this rapidly advancing field.
Dr. Chu also led a workshop titled "Leveraging Asia: How to Navigate Asian VC Investment Mandates." The session opened with the 2026 industry outlook and key trends, then highlighted priority therapeutic areas. It explained the NewCo model and the criteria Asian venture capital firms use to evaluate global biotech assets, their co‑investment preferences, and expectations for commercialization. The workshop featured Asia‑based investors Dr. Alva Chen, Managing Director and Head of Therapeutics, VMS Group; Jayson Lee, Partner and Head of Healthcare Investing, LongRiver Investments; and Dr. Maomeng Tong, Principal, INCE Capital, who shared strategic insights for biotechs pursuing cross‑border capital or collaboration.
"Asia's steady capital recovery is fueling more diverse, higher-quality biotech deals. Investors are increasingly favoring more scalable, capital-efficient, innovative business models. One such emerging approach is the NewCo model, which combines equity participation with experienced management teams, leverages Asia's efficient clinical speed and ecosystem partners to accelerate data generation, and enables program-level co-development. These elements de-risk global development in multiple ways, making the opportunities more attractive for international syndicates," said Dr. Alva Chen, Managing Director and Head of Therapeutics, VMS Group.
"Clinical development now spans multiple regions more than ever and requires an integrated strategy. HiRO's cross‑border capabilities across APAC, the US, and Europe allow us to align regulatory strategy, site selection, and operational execution to bridge data across regions, accelerate timelines, and reduce redundant costs. By leveraging local expertise, regional cost advantages, and selective partnerships, we help biotech sponsors generate earlier, higher‑quality readouts and deploy capital more efficiently to advance financing and licensing goals," said Dr. Karen Chu, Founder and CEO of HiRO.
About Harvest Integrated Research Organization (HiRO)
Harvest Integrated Research Organization (HiRO) is a globally oriented, innovative clinical research organization. With global operations and integrated capabilities, HiRO provides a full range of cross-border solutions and services to its clients, including early pre-clinical strategic planning, clinical trial design, regulatory affairs, pharmacovigilance, statistics, data management, end-to-end project management, and clinical and medical monitoring services.
As an emerging global CRO, HiRO strives to become a market-leading, integrated global clinical research organization that works collaboratively with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to bring new products from the laboratory to the market, providing more effective solutions for patients worldwide. For more information on HiRO, please visit www.harvestiro.com.
SOMERSET, N.J., March 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Harvest Integrated Research Organization (HiRO), a global contract research organization specializing in strategic planning for clinical development and cross‑border clinical trial solutions and services, concluded a successful presence at the 44th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
HiRO's Founder and CEO, Dr. Karen Chu, was a featured speaker at RESI JPM, where she moderated a panel convening investors and strategics at the forefront of the cell and gene therapy revolution. Panelists Robert Balfour of ALSA Ventures and Bettina Ernst of BERNINA BioInvest highlighted the current momentum in cell and gene therapies, discussed how they assess technical and commercial risk, identified partnership models that accelerate progress, and outlined where capital is flowing in this rapidly advancing field.
Dr. Chu also led a workshop titled "Leveraging Asia: How to Navigate Asian VC Investment Mandates." The session opened with the 2026 industry outlook and key trends, then highlighted priority therapeutic areas. It explained the NewCo model and the criteria Asian venture capital firms use to evaluate global biotech assets, their co‑investment preferences, and expectations for commercialization. The workshop featured Asia‑based investors Dr. Alva Chen, Managing Director and Head of Therapeutics, VMS Group; Jayson Lee, Partner and Head of Healthcare Investing, LongRiver Investments; and Dr. Maomeng Tong, Principal, INCE Capital, who shared strategic insights for biotechs pursuing cross‑border capital or collaboration.
"Asia's steady capital recovery is fueling more diverse, higher-quality biotech deals. Investors are increasingly favoring more scalable, capital-efficient, innovative business models. One such emerging approach is the NewCo model, which combines equity participation with experienced management teams, leverages Asia's efficient clinical speed and ecosystem partners to accelerate data generation, and enables program-level co-development. These elements de-risk global development in multiple ways, making the opportunities more attractive for international syndicates," said Dr. Alva Chen, Managing Director and Head of Therapeutics, VMS Group.
"Clinical development now spans multiple regions more than ever and requires an integrated strategy. HiRO's cross‑border capabilities across APAC, the US, and Europe allow us to align regulatory strategy, site selection, and operational execution to bridge data across regions, accelerate timelines, and reduce redundant costs. By leveraging local expertise, regional cost advantages, and selective partnerships, we help biotech sponsors generate earlier, higher‑quality readouts and deploy capital more efficiently to advance financing and licensing goals," said Dr. Karen Chu, Founder and CEO of HiRO.
About Harvest Integrated Research Organization (HiRO)
Harvest Integrated Research Organization (HiRO) is a globally oriented, innovative clinical research organization. With global operations and integrated capabilities, HiRO provides a full range of cross-border solutions and services to its clients, including early pre-clinical strategic planning, clinical trial design, regulatory affairs, pharmacovigilance, statistics, data management, end-to-end project management, and clinical and medical monitoring services.
As an emerging global CRO, HiRO strives to become a market-leading, integrated global clinical research organization that works collaboratively with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to bring new products from the laboratory to the market, providing more effective solutions for patients worldwide. For more information on HiRO, please visit www.harvestiro.com.
** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
HiRO Leads Cross‑Border Dialogue at JPM, Offering Insights for Biotechs Seeking Asian Investment
