insitro announced it will acquire CombinAbleAI and, alongside the deal, has launched TherML (Therapeutic Machine Learning), a platform it describes as a single, modality-agnostic AI engine for drug discovery and design.
The deal is expected to close in late January 2026 and is intended to expand insitro’s capabilities beyond its existing small-molecule and oligonucleotide work into antibodies and other complex biologics, creating an end-to-end system that spans target discovery through developability assessment.
The company said TherML is designed to let biology guide both modality selection and molecular design, aiming to generate clinic-ready assets faster while reducing late-stage risk. The combined platform is positioned to move developability considerations—such as stability and manufacturability—earlier in the design process rather than optimizing potency first and assessing manufacturability later.
For complex biologics, including multi-specific antibodies and T-cell engagers, TherML will incorporate CombinAbleAI’s physics-informed optimization engine, which insitro said has been pre-trained on more than 100,000 molecular dynamics surrogates to help predict protein structure and flexibility. For small molecules, insitro said TherML leverages its Quantitative Adaptive Libraries to map chemical space and generate local training data, while for oligonucleotides it applies AI and automation to industrialize siRNA candidate design across targets. The platform also includes machine learning models for ADMET prediction, built on insitro’s internal datasets and industry collaboration data, to optimize drug-likeness and safety alongside binding performance.
insitro said TherML is integrated with its automated laboratory infrastructure to rapidly generate experimental data and continuously improve model performance based on target- and modality-specific constraints. Following the acquisition, CombinAbleAI’s team will continue operating in Israel as a new insitro R&D center focused on large-molecule design. CombinAbleAI was created and incubated within AION Labs, an Israeli venture studio formed with participation from Merck KGaA, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Teva, Amazon Web Services, the Israel Biotech Fund, Amiti Ventures, and the Israel Innovation Authority.
KEY QUOTES:
“Drug discovery has traditionally optimized molecules for potency before assessing developability – often discovering that highly potent candidates face manufacturing constraints. By integrating CombinAbleAI’s physics-informed, AI-driven design for complex biologic therapeutics with our causal biology platform, we treat potency and manufacturability as interdependent design criteria from the outset. This fundamentally changes the translation from biological insight to viable therapeutic – instead of optimizing sequentially and hoping for serendipitous alignment, we’re designing for both simultaneously.”
Philip Tagari, Chief Scientific Officer, insitro
“We are delighted to welcome the CombinAbleAI team in Israel as fellow insitrocytes, alongside our colleagues in the U.S., Poland, and Malaysia. Their addition helps launch our integrated TherML platform, which is a critical part of our end-to-end industrialized AI-enabled system built for repeatable, scalable, predictable drug discovery.”
Daphne Koller, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, insitro
“Effective therapeutic design requires optimization across affinity, selectivity, stability, and manufacturability. We’re very excited to join insitro and integrate CombinAbleAI’s physics-informed AI modeling into insitro’s end-to-end discovery platform to reliably and rapidly translate high-value targets into molecules that perform as intended in the real world.”
Noam Katz, Ph.D., Co-founder, CombinAbleAI
