Bahrain to accelerate biotech sector with SandboxAQ deal

Bahrain plans to develop $1 billion in biotech assets over the next three years, taking a dramatic shortcut that may be possible thanks to a new partnership with SandboxAQ, the US firm that uses artificial intelligence and quantum techniques to accelerate drug discovery.

The kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat licensed SandboxAQ’s software to simulate biological and chemical processes, with the aim of identifying new drugs and developing therapeutics. The initiative is part of Bahrain’s push to diversify its economy beyond oil, financial services, and tourism.

Developing a biotech sector typically takes three to four decades, from hiring scientists to making viable medicines that go through an exhaustive trial-and-error process that plagues drug development, SandboxAQ’s chief executive officer Jack Hidary said in an interview.

“The majority of all intellectual property of biotech, all the medicines and patents, are owned by six countries. It’s our contention that with this kind of software we can democratize” the industry, Hidary told Semafor. “We can take it from just six countries to 30, 40 countries. And Bahrain is the first example.”

SandboxAQ — spun out of Alphabet in 2022 and is backed by investors such as T. Rowe Price, Eric Schmidt, and the CIA’s venture capital firm — has created software currently used in the biopharma, materials, and cybersecurity industries. Its quantitative models differ from the large language models that power chatbots, because they’re trained on physics, chemistry, and biology, not text or images, Hidary said. This allows the platform to simulate molecular behavior with high precision, he added.