SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — VeriSIM Life today announced it has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to advance its proprietary BIOiSIM® mechanistic AI platform for the discovery of novel therapeutics for stimulant use disorder.
The highly competitive Phase II award follows the successful completion of Phase I and recognizes the scientific progress, technical feasibility, and translational potential of VeriSIM Life's technology. Beyond supporting a therapeutic program, the award represents independent validation of BIOiSIM as a platform capable of improving drug discovery through mechanistic AI and predictive biosimulation.
"Securing a Phase II award is an important milestone for VeriSIM Life and a strong endorsement of our platform," said Dr. Jo Varshney, Founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life. "This award validates our vision that mechanistic AI can transform both drug discovery and development by enabling better decisions from target selection through clinical translation. The advances made through this program will further strengthen BIOiSIM's ability to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners discover better drug candidates, reduce development risk, and accelerate medicines to patients."
BIOiSIM combines mechanistic biosimulation with artificial intelligence to support drug discovery and development by predicting pharmacokinetics, efficacy, safety, and translational outcomes before costly experiments or clinical studies. While this award supports the discovery of novel therapies for stimulant use disorder, the scientific and computational advances generated through the program will enhance BIOiSIM®'s capabilities across oncology, neuroscience, immunology, rare diseases, and other therapeutic areas.
The Phase II award further expands VeriSIM Life's growing portfolio of government and industry validations, reinforcing the company's mission to modernize drug discovery through predictive, human-relevant computational technologies.
VeriSIM Life is a biotechnology company developing mechanistic AI technologies that improve decision-making across drug discovery and development. Its BIOiSIM® platform integrates artificial intelligence with mechanistic biosimulation to predict drug behavior, improve clinical translation, and help partners bring safer, more effective therapies to patients faster.
AtlasGEN Novel Drug Designer efficiently identifies new molecules based on favorable chemical properties and simultaneously evaluates them for clinical safety and effectiveness based on biology using VeriSIM Life’s groundbreaking Translational Index™ technology.
Iterative ranking of target engaging hits by their Translational Index values reduces the time and cost associated with other computational hit discovery approaches, while compressing the hit-to-lead refinement and optimization process by pre-validating hits for translatability. This unique integration dramatically reduces the number of compounds to evaluate in subsequent experimental research.
The ability to generate target engaging compound hits depends largely on the size of the molecular search library. The AtlasGEN search space is supported by more than 1 trillion compounds. Generative AI and deep learning techniques deliver unprecedented discovery capability.
AtlasGEN accurately predicts protein-ligand binding affinity by combining geometric conformer analysis with machine learning based on experimental data 72% more efficiently than molecular docking-based approaches.
.png)
