Charting a new era of antibiotics
Partnered with the Collins Lab at MIT in building the first-ever generative AI platform for novel antibiotic discovery.
Imagine a world in which common diseases become untreatable. That world may soon be a reality.
By 2050, the death toll of AMR is expected to reach 10 million annually, surpassing cancer as a leading cause of death. There is a critical need for new antibiotics — and yet pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have largely abandoned the space for more lucrative markets.
A Unique Business Model
Insufficient market incentives and rapid antibiotic resistance leave us vulnerable to the most deadly bacteria. Yet in the midst of this antibiotic crisis, another door is opening. Phare Bio launched in 2020 with an ambitious social venture model and the latest advances in machine learning to address this critical need. Phare is building AIBiotics, the world’s first generative AI antibiotics discovery engine, to design and develop novel antibiotics against urgent threats like Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Phare addresses the “valley of death” -- the stage in preclinical development when most drugs fail -- with donor funding, and takes on more costly clinical development with strategic commercial partnerships and company spin-outs. This model enables Phare to develop a novel pipeline of AI-optimized antibiotic candidates, derisk these candidates through preclinical development, and build a sustainable clinical path to ensure that these therapies reach the patients in greatest need.
AIBiotics Generative AI Discovery Platform
Hit-to-Lead
Optimization
Preclinical Development
Clinical Development
Phare streamlines and optimizes the development process by integrating world-class expertise and decades of experience in artificial intelligence (AI), bioengineering, and pharmaceutical development to rapidly discover and develop novel classes of antibiotics. This unique and self-sustaining approach will enable us to outpace the emergence and global dissemination of antibiotic resistance.
Meet our team
Leadership
Akhila Kosaraju
Dr. Akhila Kosaraju is the CEO and President of Phare Bio, a social venture pioneering the use of generative AI and deep learning to discover new classes of antibiotics, in collaboration with the Collins Lab at MIT. Under her leadership, Phare Bio launched with funding and support from TED’s Audacious Project, which backs bold solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. The company has since been awarded $27 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), selected for Google.org’s Generative AI Accelerator, and named to Fast Company’s 2025 World Changing Ideas list. Phare has also received a Newsweek AI Impact Award and was chosen as Wired Health’s Startup Showcase Winner.
Dr. Kosaraju has spent her career building companies and driving innovation at the intersection of infectious disease and computational biology. She was the founding CEO of Variant Bio, a venture-backed genomics and therapeutics company, and previously served as an executive at SIGA Technologies, where she helped bring antiviral drugs to market. During her tenure at SIGA, the company secured FDA approval for a novel smallpox antiviral and partnered with the CDC, BARDA, and DoD to deliver 2 million treatment courses to the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile.
Earlier in her career, Dr. Kosaraju was a White House appointee at the Pentagon, where she served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. There, she provided executive leadership for the $50 billion Military Health System, overseeing military healthcare delivery, biodefense, and international humanitarian programs.
She is a recipient of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service, the highest non-career civilian honor within the Department of Defense. Dr. Kosaraju is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-founder of the Alliance to End Biological Threats, and a Lecturer at Stanford’s Center for Biosecurity and Pandemic Resilience. She earned her M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and holds a B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University.
James J. Collins
Dr. Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science, a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, and a member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology faculty. He is also a core founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Between his three laboratories at MIT, the Wyss Institute, and the Broad Institute, he oversees the research of more than 30 postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. Collins’ numerous honors include a Rhodes Scholarship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and an NIH Director's Pioneer Award.
He is an elected member of all three national academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the World Academy of Sciences. Dr. Collins earned an AB in Physics from the College of the Holy Cross and a PhD in Medical Engineering from the University of Oxford. He has decades of experience in antibiotic discovery and the application of machine learning techniques in biotechnology.
His work has led to important discoveries related to how antibiotics kill bacteria, including research showing that many common classes of antibiotics induce bacterial cell death via a common “oxidative damage” pathway; the paper describing this is the most highly-cited antibiotics study of the last decade.
Jonathan M. Stokes
Dr. Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, and directs Phare’s computational and experimental work. He was previously a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Collins Lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He received his BHSc in 2011, graduating summa cum laude, and his PhD in Antimicrobial Chemical Biology in 2016, both from McMaster University.
His research applies a combination of chemical biology and machine learning to develop novel antibacterial therapies with expanded capabilities over conventional antibiotics. Amongst his numerous antibiotic projects, he recently led the study published in Cell that resulted in the identification of antibiotic Halicin, a first new antibiotic scaffold discovery in 20+ years. This study shows how a trained deep neural network can predict antibiotic activity in molecules that are structurally different from known antibiotics, among which Halicin exhibits efficacy against broad-spectrum bacterial infections in mice.
Stokes is the recipient of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Master’s Award, the Colin James Lyne Lock Doctoral Award, and was ranked first of just 23 elite postdoctoral scholars to be awarded the prestigious Banting Fellowship.
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