Lantern Pharma Inc., a US-based biotechnology company focused on AI-driven precision oncology, has announced the establishment of an Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence in Bengaluru, India, marking a major step in scaling its proprietary RADR® platform for global drug development.
The Bengaluru-based centre will serve as Lantern’s global scale-up hub, focusing on large-scale data engineering, development of machine learning-ready disease models, and integration with global biopharma partners. The initiative is aimed at industrialising Lantern’s AI capabilities to meet rising demand from pharmaceutical companies transitioning from pilot AI projects to enterprise-wide deployment.
The new centre will expand the technical capacity of Lantern’s RADR® platform, which currently analyses hundreds of billions of oncology-focused data points using advanced machine learning models. The expansion will accelerate development of Lantern’s specialised large language models and large quantitative models designed to optimise and generate novel molecular candidates across multiple therapeutic areas.
Lantern plans to roll out the centre’s capabilities in two phases. The first phase will focus on scaling AI-driven cancer drug development by enhancing multi-agent AI systems that support biomarker discovery, molecular optimisation, patient stratification, and clinical trial design. This phase builds on Lantern’s existing oncology pipeline, which includes three molecules in clinical trials and its CNS-focused subsidiary, Starlight Therapeutics.
The second phase will extend RADR® applications beyond oncology into inflammation, immunology, and neurodegenerative diseases, including conditions such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease. This phase is expected to support revenue growth through collaborations with pharmaceutical companies across the US, Europe, and Japan.
Lantern has begun hiring AI engineers, data scientists, computational biologists, and machine learning specialists for the Bengaluru centre. The company stated that expansion and hiring are expected to remain cash-flow neutral, with the centre operating as a cloud-native environment supporting continuous, follow-the-sun development cycles.
With this expansion, Lantern aims to position itself as a global leader in industrial-scale AI-powered drug discovery, while strengthening collaborations with pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and healthcare partners to accelerate development of data-driven therapies across multiple disease areas.
