Phylo, Inc. announced on August 4, 2026 that Chugai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. will deploy Biomni Lab, Phylo’s agentic AI platform for biomedical research, across Chugai’s drug discovery workflows, covering four areas: single-cell analysis, human genetics, disease biology, and target evaluation. The Tokyo-based drugmaker, a Roche Group member listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime Market, joins what Phylo calls its founding group of customers for the platform.
Under the collaboration, Biomni Lab connects with Chugai’s proprietary research data inside the company’s secure environment, so its agents work over internal data alongside the platform’s integrated biomedical resources. Phylo is pitching the setup against a persistent friction in discovery research: analysts moving constantly between disconnected tools and datasets while data the company has already generated sits underused, the same data bottleneck at the center of AI-powered drug discovery efforts more broadly. The companies frame the expected payoff, shorter discovery timelines and better-supported research decisions, as the collaboration’s goals rather than measured results.
Sohei Oyama, Head of Biological Technology Dept. at Chugai, said the growing scale and complexity of scientific data demands tools built specifically for discovery research. “We believe Biomni Lab can help our scientists explore scientific questions more effectively and accelerate our drug discovery to create innovative medicines for patients,” he said in the announcement.
How Biomni Lab works inside a drugmaker’s secure environment
Biomni Lab is the commercial successor to Biomni, a general-purpose biomedical AI agent first described in a June 2025 preprint and published in a peer-reviewed study in Science in 2026. The system pairs large language model reasoning with retrieval-augmented planning and code-based execution, letting it assemble and run multi-step research workflows instead of answering single questions. Its underlying environment, a catalog of tools, databases, and protocols mined from the literature across 25 biomedical domains, lets one agent move between tasks as different as causal gene prioritization, drug repurposing, and rare disease diagnosis without task-specific tuning, according to the study.
Biomni Lab packages that agent into what Phylo calls an Integrated Biology Environment: a single workspace connecting more than 300 databases, software systems, and analytical tools, plus proprietary data providers. The agents run on the company’s own research data inside its security perimeter, which is where Chugai’s single-cell, genetics, and target-evaluation work will happen. All four named work areas sit on the preclinical side of the pipeline, where discovery scientists make target and program decisions.
The strongest documented result for the commercial platform so far is company-reported: in a case study with Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA ), Biomni Lab completed more than 10 complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses, compressing what Phylo describes as weeks-long workflows into hours, with results Ginkgo scientists validated as publication-quality. The Science paper’s own case studies, covering multi-omics interpretation, protein stability optimization, and wet-lab instrument control, were produced in academic settings, and several authors disclose equity in Phylo. One senior co-author, Aviv Regev, is a Genentech officer and sits on Roche’s Corporate Executive Committee, the same group Chugai belongs to.
Biomni’s path from Stanford open source to two pharma deals
The team behind Phylo started Biomni at Stanford in June 2024 as an open-source, general-purpose agent for day-to-day biomedical research tasks. A preprint followed on June 2, 2025, and the Science version arrived the following year. By the time Phylo announced itself on February 3, 2026, alongside a $13.5 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund with Anthropic, the company said the open-source project had been adopted across more than 7,000 research labs, biopharma companies, and healthcare organizations. That launch introduced Biomni Lab in research preview and detailed the Ginkgo Bioworks case study.
Pharma deployments then arrived in quick succession. On July 28, 2026, Ono Pharmaceutical, the Osaka-based company behind the cancer immunotherapy Opdivo, said it would bring Biomni Lab to its discovery scientists, a rollout covered by Unite.AI. A week later, Chugai became the second named Japanese drugmaker to sign on to Biomni Lab.
Phylo co-founder and CEO Kexin Huang framed the Chugai deal as a return on that early adoption. “Chugai’s scientists were some of Biomni’s earliest users following our open-source release and we’re excited to bring our full platform to even more scientists through this partnership,” Huang said.
The Biomni platform in figures
- $13.5 million: Phylo’s seed round, announced February 3, 2026, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund with Anthropic
- 7,000+: research labs, biopharma companies, and healthcare organizations Phylo says adopted the open-source Biomni
- 300+: databases, software systems, and analytical tools integrated into Biomni Lab
- 25: biomedical domains mined to build Biomni’s agentic environment
- 10+: complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses run in the Ginkgo Bioworks case study, cut from weeks to hours
