Boosting R&D Productivity by 100x with AI Robot Scientists

We support 'April Dream,' an initiative to make April 1st a day to share dreams. This press release is the dream of NexaScience Inc. Why does Japan's R&D fail to produce results commensurate with investment? Japan's annual R&D expenditure exceeds 22 trillion yen, 3.7% of GDP, the highest level in the world. With about 900,000 researchers, it is a 'science and technology powerhouse.' However, this investment is not yielding results. The number of highly cited papers is only 13th in the world. The global share of patent acquisitions has shrunk to about 10%. Over 70% of corporate R&D is limited to improving existing products. The growth rate of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) has been the lowest among major countries since the late 1990s. This 'efficiency gap' is the biggest structural problem. Researchers cannot focus on research. The proportion of time university faculty spend on research has dropped from 46.5% in 2002 to 32.1% in 2023. Burdened by education and administrative tasks, the number of people effectively engaged in research has decreased by nearly 20%. In corporate settings, the number of assistants is declining, forcing researchers to handle experiment preparation and administrative work themselves. Japan's R&D is facing a structural inefficiency in the research process itself, not a funding problem. The era where AI accelerates research has already begun. Google DeepMind's AlphaFold predicted protein structures in minutes, leading to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. GNoME discovered over 2.2 million new crystal structures. In drug discovery, AI has shortened the time from target identification to clinical trial candidates from years to about 1.5 years. 'Autonomous labs' are expected to accelerate research by 10 to 100 times. NexaScience's approach: Autonomously driving from research to commercialization. We are developing a platform where AI robots autonomously conduct research activities. These 'AI Robot Scientists' conceive ideas, plan and execute experiments, analyze results, and write papers. We aim for the autonomous drive of the entire 'Research -> IP -> Commercialization' cycle. Why '100x'? Because Japan has the world's 3rd largest R&D investment, there is room for dramatic improvement through process efficiency. By restoring researchers' time, accelerating experiment cycles with AI, and automating the path to commercialization, 100x is within reach. NexaScience CEO Yoshitaka Ushiku: 'I have received opportunities for R&D from Japan as a national project. My origin is the desire to give back. I want to change Japan's R&D with this new approach.'