How AI Builds Cancer Drugs From Scratch | Aridni Shah, Immunito AI

What if the biggest bottleneck in AI antibody discovery was never AlphaFold's problem to solve at all? Dr. Aridni Shah of Immunito AI sat down with host Akshay Datt to explain how her team builds antibodies from a target's shape alone, compressing a process that used to take animals a year and a half into hours.

Dr. Aridni Shah left academic structural biology, after a PhD at NCBS-TIFR studying honeybee brains, when she hit the wall every antibody researcher knows: custom antibody generation can take a year to eighteen months with no guarantee of success. That bottleneck became the founding insight behind Immunito AI, the Bengaluru TechBio company she co-founded with Trisha Chatterjee in 2020. Instead of injecting animals and waiting, Immunito AI uses generative AI to design antibodies atom by atom, directly from a target protein's shape, a technique the company built before AlphaFold existed. Across four internal preclinical oncology and autoimmune programmes, and licensing economics that can rival Merck's $30 billion Keytruda, the company is testing whether Indian deep tech can originate novel biologics instead of just manufacturing generics. In this conversation, Aridni walks host Akshay Datt through AI antibody discovery and why Indian venture capital still struggles to underwrite biotech risk.

👉How Immunito AI's AbInitio platform designs antibody sequences and 3D structures simultaneously from a target protein's shape, without animal immunization.

👉Why Aridni Shah's PhD research on honeybee time memory exposed the yearlong bottleneck in traditional antibody discovery that led her to found Immunito AI.

👉What makes AlphaFold different from Immunito AI's AbInitio, and why protein folding prediction alone cannot design a new antibody from scratch.

👉How a single preclinical antibody licensing deal can carry a $10 to $50 million upfront fee and $200 to $500 million in milestones, similar to how Merck's Keytruda scaled to $30 billion in annual sales.

👉Why Indian venture capital funds still struggle to underwrite biotech and drug discovery risk compared to US funds like a16z.

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