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SandboxAQ NVIDIA Team Up to Advance AI-Powered Drug Discovery and Medical Imaging

• By John K. Waters
• 04/16/2025

AI and quantum computing company SandboxAQ has announced a new collaboration with NVIDIA aimed at accelerating breakthroughs in drug development, therapeutic design, and medical imaging through the deployment of a new AI platform built on NVIDIA's DGX Cloud infrastructure.

The partnership will enable SandboxAQ to expand its Large Quantitative Model (LQM) platform—an AI-native simulation engine designed to model biological and chemical processes with unprecedented accuracy and speed. By leveraging DGX Cloud on Google Cloud, the companies aim to streamline medical research and deliver faster, more precise insights across healthcare and life sciences.

"Our expanded work with NVIDIA accelerates our customers' ability to innovate and lead in their fields," said SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary, in a statement. "This collaboration enables us to radically compress R&D timelines and deliver actionable insights to organizations pursuing life-saving treatments."

Founded out of Alphabet Inc., SandboxAQ has rapidly grown into a leader in scientific AI, backed by major investors including T. Rowe Price, BNP Paribas, and Marc Benioff. The company's LQMs are engineered to solve complex, real-world problems where traditional AI models fall short, particularly those that demand scientific reliability, regulatory compliance, and high-dimensional accuracy.

Transforming Drug Discovery with AI and Quantum Simulation
The LQM platform replaces conventional "design-make-test" workflows in drug discovery with high-performance, equation-based modeling. By simulating how drug candidates interact with biological systems—including hard-to-map enzyme sites and complex molecular structures—SandboxAQ can significantly reduce preclinical development timelines from months to weeks.

According to the company, its latest Agentic AI Chemist can autonomously screen millions of molecular combinations, accelerating therapeutic discovery at a scale far beyond traditional laboratory processes. The AI models are trained on curated biomedical datasets combining chemical, genomic, and clinical data, which help to improve efficacy predictions and reduce costly false positives.

The platform is already being deployed by pharma companies to enhance preclinical pipeline performance, with early indicators showing improvements in hit-to-lead conversion rates and target validation accuracy.

Advancing Medical Imaging and Simulation
Beyond drug discovery, SandboxAQ is applying its platform to medical imaging and diagnostics. High-fidelity simulations of biological tissues and molecular interactions support improved imaging resolution, more accurate anomaly detection, and real-time model-based interpretation of scan data.

"With NVIDIA DGX Cloud, SandboxAQ is pushing the boundaries of AI-native science," said Alexis Bjorlin, Vice President of NVIDIA DGX Cloud, in a statement. "The scale and performance of our platform is unlocking transformative applications across the healthcare continuum."

Breakthroughs in Quantum Chemistry and Biological Modeling
The partnership builds on prior successes. In 2024, SandboxAQ and NVIDIA achieved an 80x speedup in quantum chemistry simulations using CUDA-accelerated techniques, enabling new insights into enzyme function and catalysis. In a 2025 milestone, researchers successfully modeled a system with 82 electrons in 82 orbitals—a previously unachievable benchmark in the field.

These advances signal a shift in what's computationally feasible for life sciences, enabling previously intractable problems in molecular biology and pharmacokinetics to be explored with greater precision.