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Ian Quigley

Co-founder & CEO, Leash Bio

Search every verified Ian Quigley interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ian Quigley, co-founder and CEO of Leash Bio, discussed the company's work with DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) and the limitations of AI in chemistry during an October 2026 podcast appearance. He described an experiment where Leash trained a classifier to predict which chemist created a molecule based solely on its structure, achieving a top-five accuracy of 60 percent across 1,815 chemists. Quigley said this result suggested that models may learn the "sociology" of molecule creators rather than underlying chemical principles, comparing the phenomenon to a horse that appeared to solve math problems by reading its owner's cues. He also noted that Leash had released a dataset a thousand times larger than previous ones, giving it roughly a 5 percent chance that recent advances in co-folding approaches would make the company obsolete, which he said did not happen. Quigley stated that Leash aims to produce clean, reproducible protein–small-molecule binding data from DELs and to build what he described as a "physically grounded substrate" for biomedical reasoning. He expressed interest in validating measurements through additional clean assays and said the company is hiring machine learning personnel and seeking partners.

Recent appearances

  • Why a 4-Billion-Point Kaggle Dataset Still Couldn’t Beat Chance — Ian Quigley, Leash Bio

    October 14, 2026 · 📺 Latent Space

    From a four-billion-measurement Kaggle competition to models that recognize a molecule’s chemist, Leash Bio is testing what AI actually learns about chemistry. Co-founder and CEO Ian Quigley joins Brandon Anderson and RJ Honicky to explain how Leash makes DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) produce clean, reproducible protein–small-molecule binding data—and why collecting the right experiments matters as much as choosing a model. We go deep on hidden shortcuts in public datasets, Hermes’ comparison with Boltz, and the protein mutations that expose memorization. Ian explains how Leash’s measured chem…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • How AI Is Reshaping Life Science Today | BioUtah Summit Panel

    December 16, 2025 · 📺 Good Medicine Podcast

    This week on the Good Medicine Podcast, we are sharing a prerecorded panel hosted by Dr. David Bearss at the BioUtah Life Science Summit. The panel brings together leaders from across the industry, including Hariprasad Vankalapati of Biolexis, Alison O’Mahony of Seek Labs, and Ian Quigley of Leash Bio. Together, they discuss how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape drug discovery, diagnostics, and the way companies make decisions. The conversation highlights how AI helps teams understand both positive and negative data, identify emerging threats, and improve the success rate of bri…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

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