Qubigen Wins Gold at the 2026 AFR BOSS Most Innovative Companies Awards
Qubigen is thrilled to announce that we have been named the Gold winner in the Medical category of The Australian Financial Review AFR BOSS Most Innovative Companies Awards, taking out the top spot in this prestigious national competition.
Read the full feature article in The Australian Financial Review.
Pioneering Decentralized Intelligence in Drug Discovery
While the headlines across the tech and biotech sectors continue to be dominated by massive frontier AI labs and centralized foundation models, the industry faces an immutable bottleneck. Traditional AI models still demand either public datasets or private project data that must leave the lab, creating insurmountable data-sovereignty and IP leakage risks for pharmaceutical companies and research institutions.
As highlighted in The Australian Financial Review, pharmaceutical companies spend many years and billions of dollars generating massive troves of experimental data, yet “most of those attempts fail... and all that useful knowledge of the failed attempts can never leave the lab. So, the next experiment has to start almost from scratch.” Centralized foundation models and multi-tenant platforms (such as historical attempts like MELLODDY) attempt to solve this by pooling data, but they create severe IP leakage risks, exposing which chemical series a rival is chasing.
Leveraging Pharma’s Secret Data Without Exposing Secrets
Qubigen’s award-winning platform solves this structural impasse through patented Federated AI for Drug Discovery and Design (FedAIDD). Rather than forcing data to move to a central cloud, our technology builds AI engines that can learn from confidential pharmaceutical data, including failed reactions, chemistry, and proprietary assay results, without ever moving or exposing the underlying data.
By deploying secure, containerized AI engines natively within client environments, our platform enables research labs to learn from their own high-value results, including both successful lead generation and critical unpublished failed experiments, without ever copying, sharing, or moving raw data. This approach unlocks secure, proprietary drug design loops while preserving absolute data sovereignty.
As Qubigen founder Jonathan Hall explained in the AFR, “This is a new way of being able to use data without actually moving or seeing it and keeping data sovereignty in a day and age where people care a lot about where the data sits.”
Qubigen’s CSO Dr Sonya Diakiw further highlights, “Qubigen's platform tailors AI to a lab’s own results, without the data being copied or shared. The lab gets a better list of what molecules to make next”.
Driven by an All-Star Team and Strong Partnerships
This national recognition reflects the exceptional dedication of our core team: CSO Dr Sonya Diakiw PhD, CIO A/Prof Jun Zeng FRACI, CTO Andrew Murphy, Operations Manager David Brooks, Senior Machine Learning Engineer Dr Tuc Van Nguyen PhD, Senior Software Engineer Joshua Spender, and CEO Dr Jonathan Hall PhD.
We extend our sincere thanks to our Board of Directors: Prof. Andrew Wilks, Dr Amir Zalcenstein, Dr Fabio Turatti, James Roche, and Chair Dr Michelle Perugini, alongside Corporate Secretary Rosemarie Singson, and our key advisors Matt Oristano and Trevor Thompson. Most importantly, we thank all our research and commercial partners who continue to collaborate with us on live projects as we scale our impact across the sector.
Reaching Toward a New Standard
This national recognition from the AFR underscores our mission: transforming how the pharmaceutical industry utilizes its most valuable, hidden asset: its historical data. By eliminating time-wasting dead ends and allowing research labs to securely optimize leads without compromising privacy, Qubigen is establishing the benchmark for secure, enterprise-grade in-silico drug discovery.
Watch Qubigen
Take a look at Qubigen’s AFR BOSS Gold Winner Video about its cutting edge approach, presented at the AFR Gala Awards Night: https://vimeo.com/1239655077
Qubigen - Accelerate Drug Design Without Exposing Secrets
Qubigen builds and hosts powerful, privacy-preserving AI Engines, turning discrete client-specific data into a competitive edge. Whether you're advancing active programs, reviving dormant data, or starting from scratch, Qubigen’s secure Federated AI and computational modelling and chemistry platform can help you identify, optimize, and accelerate the path to promising lead drug candidates. Get in touch to explore how we can support your next development.
