Variant Bio Launches Inference, the World's First Agentic AI Genomic Drug Discovery Platform

Platform integrates proprietary and public genetic and multi-omic data with cutting-edge AI to transform drug discovery

Inference Agents autonomously execute PhD-level analyses using Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Platform now available to pharmaceutical research partners; powers collaborations totaling over $200 million

SEATTLE, Jan. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Variant Bio, a genomics-driven AI drug discovery company, today announced the launch of Inference, the world's first agentic genomic drug discovery platform. Built on seven years of development and over $100 million of investment in data and infrastructure, Inference transforms how pharmaceutical R&D teams harness human genetic data to discover and validate therapeutic targets.

Variant Bio developed the platform to be the definitive solution for genomic drug discovery. As a company that generates proprietary human genomic data from studies around the world, processes and analyzes massive multi-omic datasets, and advances its own drug development programs, Variant Bio is uniquely positioned to build and continuously improve this platform through direct application to real-world drug discovery challenges.

Unprecedented Scale and Data Integration

Variant Bio has ingested and harmonized data from major genetic and multi-omic association studies, and numerous global biobanks, alongside proprietary datasets from Variant Bio's studies with underrepresented populations. The platform has processed hundreds of billions of genetic associations across tens of thousands of genome-wide association studies, creating the largest single unified source of public and proprietary human genomic data for drug discovery.

The platform's architecture reflects a fundamentally different design philosophy. Rather than offering static, precomputed results, Inference provides structured, harmonized data instantly available for dynamic downstream analyses. A proprietary application programming interface (API) powers the entire platform, enabling instant retrieval of gene and variant-level data across hundreds of millions of data points in seconds.

"With Inference, we built the tool we wished existed when we started Variant Bio. Enterprise software design principles, applied by people who actually do genomic research. When you're solving your own problems, you build something real."

— Stephane Castel, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Variant Bio

AI-Powered Discovery Capabilities

Inference incorporates two breakthrough AI capabilities designed to accelerate target discovery. VB-Predict creates molecular models of disease using proprietary transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data and neural networks. These models can be applied across cohorts to predict traits and identify the targets most correlated with disease outcomes. VB-Atlas learns embeddings from tens of thousands of association studies to map genome-wide relationships between genes and phenotypes. This enables instant querying of genes associated with any phenotype or genes with similar profiles, and critically, makes massive datasets immediately accessible to large language models (LLMs).

World's First Agentic Genomic Discovery Platform

Most significantly, Variant Bio is introducing Inference Agents - autonomous AI agents capable of executing advanced analyses and interpreting results. These agents use LLMs to plan and carry out analyses requiring hundreds of chained data queries and API calls - from validating a therapeutic target by assessing causality, determining effect direction, and scanning for safety liabilities, to systematically ranking putative causal genes across hundreds of disease-associated loci by integrating across evidence types and datasets.

The framework is built on emerging standards including the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling seamless integration wherever teams interact with generative AI, including Claude and ChatGPT desktop applications. Unlike literature-review approaches, Inference Agents make novel discoveries from foundational data using first principles.

"As early AI investors, we've seen countless approaches to drug discovery. What Variant Bio has built stands out as one of the most impressive applications of agentic AI. They're avoiding artificial hype and building autonomous systems doing actual scientific research, with real implications for patients."

— Josh Wolfe, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Lux Capital

Opening Access to Research Partners

While Variant Bio initially built the platform for internal use, discovering targets that are the basis of four drug development programs, the company is now opening Inference to research partners. The platform serves as the centerpiece of collaborations with multiple pharmaceutical partners, including multi-year discovery alliances with combined deal values exceeding $200 million.

Partners can upload their own proprietary genetic and multi-omic data to the platform, with a robust permission system ensuring data remains private and secure. Variant Bio continues to expand the data available on the platform, incorporating additional public and proprietary datasets on an ongoing basis.

Advancing the Mission

Variant Bio Inference enables the company to realize its mission to maximize the utility of genomic data for drug discovery, fulfilling commitments to research participants and patients. Revenue generated from the platform is subject to Variant Bio's benefit-sharing pledge, which directs tangible financial benefits to partner communities worldwide who contributed their data to genomic research.

To coincide with the platform launch, Variant Bio is introducing a dedicated website at inference.bio with comprehensive information about platform capabilities and partnership opportunities.

About Variant Bio Variant Bio is developing life-saving therapies by studying the genes of people with exceptional health-related traits. By identifying communities with unique genetic architectures and outlier phenotypes, Variant Bio has identified novel human genetic evidence that is the basis for programs with breakthrough potential across multiple therapeutic areas. The company's research is powered by its proprietary Inference platform, which integrates across deep phenotyping and multi-omic data using statistical genetics and AI/ML approaches to identify and validate therapeutic targets. With ethics at its core, the company launched an unprecedented benefit-sharing program in 2020, in which it has pledged tangible benefits that directly impact the communities it partners with throughout the world. Follow Variant Bio's news and updates at www.variantbio.com and via its blog, on X/Twitter @VariantBio, on Instagram @variant_bio, and on LinkedIn.

SOURCE Variant Bio