Sean McClain is the founder and CEO of Absci, a leading generative artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery company with a mission to create better biologics for patients, faster. Absci’s platform merges cutting-edge generative AI models with proprietary high-throughput wet-lab data to design novel therapeutics against challenging disease targets with large unmet medical need.
McClain started Absci in 2011 from a basement lab in Portland, Oregon. He scaled the company to over 150 employees, raised over $600 million in capital, established a growing number of industry-leading partnerships (including with Merck, NVIDIA and AMD, among others) and developed an internal pipeline of AI-designed drug discovery programs.
Absci’s pipeline includes ABS-101, a potential best-in-class therapeutic for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease that is in Phase I clinical trials, and ABS-201, a potentially category-defining therapeutic for androgenetic alopecia (commonly known as female- or male-pattern hair loss).