, is expected to accelerate the company’s efforts in designing orally available treatments for diseases typically addressed with injectable biologics.){kind=link}
Orbis Medicines, a biotech company specializing in oral drug development, has become the first to utilize Denmark’s new national AI supercomputer, Gefion. The move, announced jointly by Orbis and the Danish Center for AI Innovation (DCAI), is expected to accelerate the company’s efforts in designing orally available treatments for diseases typically addressed with injectable biologics.
Gefion, launched in 2024 and operated by DCAI, houses 1,528 NVIDIA GPUs and ranks among the most powerful supercomputers globally. It is designed for large-scale artificial intelligence applications and has been used in fields ranging from weather modeling to quantum computing. This marks its first publicized use in drug discovery.
Orbis aims to develop a new class of compounds, known as nCycles, that can cross cell membranes and be taken orally, traits uncommon for complex drugs that traditionally require injection. The company’s proprietary platform, nGen, has already been used to create and test over 700,000 of these compounds. By integrating the supercomputer into its pipeline, Orbis says it will be able to explore chemical possibilities beyond its current database of 140 billion compounds.
“With access to Gefion, we can now design entirely new collections of molecules and explore a much broader chemical space” Morten Graugaard, CEO of Orbis Medicines. He described the partnership as a way to accelerate the development of next-generation drugs with better accessibility and convenience for patients.
The collaboration reflects a growing trend in biotech, where artificial intelligence is used to model and predict the behavior of new molecules before they are synthesized in the lab. According to Orbis Board Chair Mikael Dolsten, the use of AI and supercomputing could eventually lead to drug candidates that challenge the dominance of current injectable biologic therapies.
DCAI CEO Dr. Nadia Carlsten emphasized that Orbis represents the type of partner Gefion was designed for: one with in-house AI expertise and the ability to generate extensive data sets. “Gefion was built to solve some of the hardest problems in science and innovation”.