New awards from the OpenAI Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and ARPA-H will generate large-scale experimental datasets and open AI models spanning drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and toxicity
Emeryville, CA – September 30, 2026 – Octant, Inc., a clinical-stage drug discovery company developing correctors for protein misfolding diseases, today announced that OpenADMET, the open science initiative with Octant, University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and the Open Molecular Software Foundation (OMSF), has received $34.8 million in new funding across three awards. The awards include a $15 million grant from the OpenAI Foundation through its Public Data for Health program, a $4.9 million grant from the Gates Foundation, and $14.9 million in Phase II funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as the consortium’s award transitions to Phase II a full year ahead of schedule. Together, the three awards extend OpenADMET’s work across the properties that determine whether a small molecule becomes a medicine: absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET).
Small molecule therapies dominate disease treatment globally, but their unpredictable ADMET properties complicate drug development. OpenADMET addresses this through three integrated strategies: systematically characterizing proteins and mechanisms through structural and functional assays, exploring how molecules interact with biological systems via high-throughput chemistry, and developing AI/ML computational models to integrate findings. A key part of our approach is community blind challenges, inspired by the CASP challenge that ultimately enabled AlphaFold's breakthrough. These challenges benchmark current capabilities and identify where the field is still struggling.
“Every drug company has to figure out ADMET challenges individually for what essentially is a commons problem,” said Sri Kosuri, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Octant. “OpenADMET is a community effort to build datasets and evaluate AI models that predict these properties so we can accelerate progress across the field. Over OpenADMET’s first 18 months, I’ve been so excited to see the participation and collaboration from researchers across industry and academia. With this new funding from OpenAI Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and ARPA-H, the OpenADMET consortium can double down and expand our approaches for several more years.”
The $15 million grant from the OpenAI Foundation extends OpenADMET into absorption and distribution, with a focus on the membrane transporters that govern whether a compound reaches its site of action. The challenge is most acute at the blood-brain barrier: in Alzheimer’s disease alone, more than 200 compounds have entered clinical trials over the past two decades with a 99.6% failure rate, in large part because efflux transporters such as P-glycoprotein actively pump small molecules back out of the central nervous system. Under the grant, Octant will use its high-throughput analytical chemistry pipelines to profile physicochemical properties and transporter interactions across tens of thousands of diverse small molecules, while structural biologists at UCSF determine high-resolution structures of the key transporters that control passage across biological barriers, including the blood-brain barrier. The datasets will be released publicly and used in prospective blind challenges to benchmark predictive models against newly measured experimental data.
ARPA-H has triggered Phase II of OpenADMET’s award under the AVOID-OME program, a full year ahead of schedule, on the strength of the consortium’s Phase I results. Octant will continue its high-throughput data generation for the consortium. Phase II directs the consortium’s resources toward a deep, comprehensive map of drug metabolism, which accounts for roughly 30% of adverse drug reactions and 10 to 15% of clinical failures. In Phase II, OpenADMET will build and screen 15 key assay targets against tens of thousands of diverse small molecules, expand structural coverage across metabolic enzymes and nuclear receptors, and continue quarterly blind challenges and open data releases. Early data from the consortium’s pipelines are already challenging standard medicinal chemistry assumptions about CYP liabilities.
The $4.9 million grant from the foundation addresses toxicity, which accounts for roughly 30% of clinical trial failures, by focusing on two of the most important off-target liabilities in small molecule drug development: the hERG potassium channel, which is linked to cardiotoxicity, and aminergic GPCRs, which anchor every industry-standard secondary pharmacology panel yet have almost no open, standardized data. The work has particular importance for global health. Small molecules remain the most practical modality for patients in underserved regions because they can be manufactured at low cost, stored without a cold chain, and taken orally. But in settings where treatment is delivered without cardiac monitoring, and where malnutrition and co-administered therapies for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria compound the risk, medicines need wide safety margins designed in from the start. OpenADMET will generate large, standardized functional datasets across hERG and key aminergic GPCRs, solve compound-bound structures to map the binding pockets that drive off-target engagement, and release datasets, baseline models, and blind challenges so the community can validate predictive safety tools against unbiased ground truth.
All datasets, benchmarks, and models produced under these awards will be made broadly accessible to researchers around the world. Updates, dataset releases, and upcoming blind challenges are available at openadmet.org.
About Octant
Octant is a clinical-stage drug discovery company developing small molecule correctors for protein misfolding diseases. Octant’s platform, The Navigator, combines high-throughput synthetic biology, generative chemistry, and AI/ML to discover and develop therapeutics against complex cellular mechanisms in human cells. OCT-980 is a small molecule corrector for RHO-adRP, and Octant’s pipeline includes several other programs across other rare diseases and oncology. For more information visit www.octant.bio.
About OpenADMET
The OpenADMET Consortium is an open science initiative on a mission to make therapeutic development more reliable, affordable, and effective by improving the prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) properties of small molecules. Launched in 2024, the consortium includes UC San Francisco, Octant, and the Open Molecular Software Foundation. Learn more at openadmet.org.