Xtalks Featured Member: Jonathan Hall, Founder & CEO, Qubigen

Say hello to Xtalks Featured Community Member Dr. Jonathan Hall, Founder and CEO of Qubigen, whose pioneering work in Federated AI is reshaping drug discovery and development. Read his vision for secure, collaborative AI in drug discovery and beyond.

What Are Your Proudest Life Science Achievements?

My most impactful achievement in the life sciences is the development of an AI technology that led to Qubigen.
In 2016, I invented and founded Life Whisperer Diagnostics, a computer vision application for embryo assessment in IVF, which was acquired by Astec Bio in 2024. The technology required management of healthcare data across institutions to allow AI to generalize and translate well to different settings. This difficult problem led to the development of a decentralized AI training system, and our own cost-effective patented Federated AI algorithm, 187x more cost-efficient than traditional distributed systems learning. The power of Federated AI goes beyond one specific industry, and in 2024, we were introduced to a market where Federated AI would have potentially the greatest impact: drug design. Why the greatest impact?

Big pharma invests trillions of dollars in R&D every year and yet less than 10% of drugs make it to market, and cost more than $2 billion per drug. AI can help design drugs much faster and more cost-effectively, but AI is heavily reliant on quality data, which is too sensitive to disclose. With new cutting-edge medicines relying on up-to-date knowledge locked behind institutional firewalls, only Federated AI can solve this problem of securely leveraging global drug design knowledge without exposing secrets, for a transformational disruption to traditional biopharma.

What Are Your Day-to-Day Job Highlights?

My day-to-day job focuses on the following areas:

• Investor and key stakeholder relations, fundraising and presales activity for new collaborations and clients
• Driving the business operations, contracts and staff management
• Scientific and AI work: ideas for new projects that fit in with our business plan, patent management, liaising between the board and staff to ensure alignment between the R&D tasks and the future vision.

What Are Your Favorite Life Science Innovations?

First, our top innovation is our Federated AI system for drug design (FedAIDD). It has two powerful abilities: to leverage data insights without moving or seeing the data or exposing secrets, and to offer a level of data/node control to curate and apportion the data, manage AI training runs and ensure the best outcome, all at-arms-length. Together, this makes AI training more secure, more complete, more flexible, more compliant and more cost-effective. This is a must-have for the dynamic nature of drug design and the use of adaptive algorithms in real-time.

Second, and related, is our integration of the latest LLM methods, GPT-style models in pharma, uniquely enabled by Federated AI. But unlike ChatGPT, Qubigen’s FedAIDD leverages the best data that remains securely locked in institutes and pharma companies, and coupled together with our GPU-parallelized quantum chemistry algorithms, slashes drug design from years to just weeks, unlocking collaborative breakthroughs that no one company could develop on their own.

What Is Your Vision for the Future of the Industry?

We’re building the most intelligent, secure, disease-agnostic AI engine in drug discovery, but the beautiful part is we don’t own the data. Instead of centralizing data, we’re collaborating across proprietary firewalls while keeping data secure. In terms of scope and breadth, it has more potential to be the best therapeutics database than any central repository.

But this is bigger than just drug design data. Expanding Federated AI downstream to preclinical data and then clinical trials, the influence of leveraging disaggregated datasets to develop robust, generalizable, predictive AI means that the extreme cost inefficiencies in trial design could begin to be addressed.

With the power of AI harnessed with a diverse and extensive dataset, we could see the dawn of all drugs being cheaper for everyone, forever, and breakthroughs in the toughest cancers and rare diseases that would otherwise be beyond our reach.

Apply Yourself or Nominate a Peer

Do you know someone doing incredible work in the life sciences? Or perhaps you’re proud of your own journey and want to inspire others? We’d love to hear from you.

You can apply to be an Xtalks Featured Community Member or nominate a colleague through our simple online form. It takes just a few minutes, and it could open doors to new conversations, partnerships and recognition across the industry.

Let’s celebrate the people driving life sciences forward, one story at a time.