Toronto - June 4, 2026 - The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC)  and the Acceleration Consortium (AC) announced today a formalized partnership to help tackle a persistent challenge in biomedicine and early drug discovery: the development of bioactive molecules with drug-like properties, advancing our understanding of human health and disease and jump-starting new drug discovery programs.

“The Acceleration Consortium is driving a revolutionary era for scientific discovery, and this partnership will be a force multiplier for Canadian-led innovation in pharmaceutical sciences,” said AC Director Alán Aspuru-Guzik. “Combining AC’s global self-driving lab expertise with SGC’s open science leadership expedites the search, design, and testing of new drugs, helping patients access potentially life-saving or more effective treatments faster.”  

Recent advances in artificial intelligence are poised to dramatically increase the discovery of millions upon millions of chemical compounds that may have therapeutic potential. However, the current challenge is to rapidly test and further develop these promising molecules into potent, selective and pharmacologically relevant agents, and then onwards to new drugs.  

This growing gap between the speed of initial compound identification and the capacity to optimize them has emerged as a critical barrier to scaling early drug discovery -- a traditionally slow and resource-intensive process.    

To break down this barrier, SGC’s partnership with the AC invests in a new approach to medicinal chemistry (the science of designing new drugs), integrating self-driving lab (SDL) capabilities into its research efforts.  

The Medicinal Chemistry SDL is part of the AC, a flagship University of Toronto initiative. The SDL combines AI, robotics, and advanced computing to automate iterative Design–Make–Test–Analyze cycles, enabling rapid synthesis, testing, and refinement of potential drug compounds.  

The AC-SGC collaboration will play a central role in advancing SGC’s Target 2035 initiative, which aims to develop a pharmacological tool for every human protein. Achieving this goal requires not only the generation of large-scale, high-quality protein–ligand datasets by SGC but also the AC SDL’s ability to efficiently optimize chemical starting points into usable pharmacologically active tools with AI and automation.

“As Target 2035 progresses, we anticipate a rapid increase in validated chemical starting points - but current medicinal chemistry workflows are not equipped to process these at scale,” said Professor Cheryl Arrowsmith, Chief Scientist of SGC-Toronto Laboratory and co-advisor of the Medicinal Chemistry SDL, alongside Professor Robert Batey. “This is why SGC is making a strategic investment in self-driving lab capabilities, as one of our many approaches to enable the next phase of scalable, AI-driven drug discovery.”

The AC SDL will operate under SGC’s open science model, ensuring that methods, data, and results are made openly available to the global research community. It will also be embedded within the broader ecosystems of the Collaborative Centre for Drug Discovery at the University Health Network and the SGC partners focused on advancing AI-driven drug discovery, supported by approximately $50 million in industry funding.

About Target 2035  

Target 2035 is a global open science initiative that brings together scientists from academia, industry, and the public sector to accelerate the development of chemical and biological tools for studying human proteins. By coordinating large-scale data generation, technology development, and open collaboration, Target 2035 aims to deliver a pharmacological modulator for every protein in the human proteome by 2035.

More information about Target 2035: https://www.thesgc.org/target2035 

About the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC)  

The Structural Genomics Consortium is a global public-private partnership that seeks to accelerate drug discovery by fostering collaboration among a large network of scientists in academia and industry and making all research outputs openly available to the scientific community. The current SGC research sites are located at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Karolinska Institute, McGill University, UCL, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University Health Network (UHN) and UNICAMP.  

More information about SGC: https://www.thesgc.org/   

About the Acceleration Consortium

Based at the University of Toronto (U of T), the Acceleration Consortium (AC) is a global community of academia, industry, and government that is accelerating the discovery of materials and molecules needed for a sustainable future. 

The AC builds self-driving labs (SDLs) that use AI and automation to reduce the time and cost of bringing materials to market—such as sorbents to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, membranes to filter water, and molecules to treat cancer and antimicrobial-resistant disease. We are also committed to evaluating the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of discovery, learning from Indigenous and community experts to guide our materials and technologies toward the benefit of society and the planet. 

Supported by a $200 million investment from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), the AC is building a world-leading centre for materials research and innovation. This includes six new SDLs at the University of Toronto and a scale-up lab at the University of British Columbia, led by over 35 research scientists and a cohort of more than 60 academic, industry and government partners.

Media Contacts

Sofia Melliou, Research and Outreach Communication Specialist 
Structural Genomics Consortium 
Email: sofia.melliou@thesgc.org