When Margo Georgiadis talks about her motivation for founding Montai Therapeutics, a biotech company using AI to discover new treatments for chronic diseases, she puts it simply: "There's nothing like a mom on a mission."
That mission began when one of her children developed a debilitating autoimmune disease, and Georgiadis witnessed firsthand the limited options available.
"For him, just seeing that there were not accessible therapies that were pathway modifying without a lot of side effects was just frustrating," Georgiadis said in an exclusive interview with Cure. "When you start these things in your 20s, and you have to be on these medications often for decades, the opportunity to be able to offer something that was truly not just a symptom reliever but actually could go at those underlying pathways was just a big motivator for me."
Georgiadis is no ordinary mom. Before co-founding Montai in 2022, she served as CEO of Ancestry.com and Mattel, was President of Americas at Google, and sits on McDonald's board of directors.
Montai is Defining a New Paradigm in Drug Discovery
At Montai, Georgiadis and her team are pioneering a radically different approach to finding new treatments. The company uses artificial intelligence to analyze what they call "Anthromolecules™" – bioactive compounds found in foods, supplements and herbal medicines that humans have consumed for millennia.
Once a promising molecule is identified, Montai works to refine and optimize it, tweaking its structure to make it more potent, safer and easier to turn into a medication.
This process helps ensure that the compound can effectively target disease while also being practical to manufacture and prescribe.
By applying AI and modern chemistry, Montai aims to expand the possibilities for small-molecule drugs, unlocking treatments for conditions that have been difficult—or even impossible—to address with traditional approaches.
"We just couldn't do it at massive scale before. And now we can," Georgiadis said. "We understand this chemistry in hundreds of millions and soon billions of compounds."
The company has used this approach to build a pipeline of nine drug programs targeting seven different pathways in inflammation and immunology — areas where many existing treatments, such as biologics, remain inaccessible to a majority of patients.
By focusing on small-molecule drugs that can be taken as pills, Montai aims to create therapies that are not only effective but also easier to manufacture, distribute, and afford.
Georgiadis Brings Silicon Valley Thinking to Healthcare
Georgiadis' background in technology and consumer businesses has shaped her approach to biotech in ways that differ from industry veterans.
At Google, Ancestry, and Mattel, she learned to think about scaling solutions and making them accessible to the broadest possible audience – principles she's now applying to healthcare.
"Small molecules are the workforce of therapeutics," she said. "The more we can innovate in that space so that when we discover new biology, if we bring small molecules that are potent and selective to any of those pathways, our ability to have a positive impact on the widest range of people's disease outcomes is going to be transformative."
Montai’s approach reflects a broader effort in the industry to develop therapies that are both effective and accessible.
While biologic drugs have transformed treatment for many diseases, they can be costly and require specialized administration. Montai is developing small-molecule drugs designed to be as precise and potent as biologics, but in a pill form that is easier to take and distribute.
"If you just take immunology, we've had huge innovation in very fundamental therapies the last 10 to 15 years. But biologics, which are the lion's share of that, right? Take the top 10 selling drugs in immunology – they're all biologics," Georgiadis said. "But the truth is they're less than 10 percent of all diagnosed patients for those diseases, and less than 50 percent of the most severe."
A Convergence of Technologies Makes Montai’s New Approaches Possible
The timing of Montai's founding coincides with an inflection point in technology that makes their approach viable now in ways it wouldn't have been even five years ago.
"I do think we've seen multiple waves of AI innovation in therapeutics," Georgiadis said. "Fifteen years ago, people were really focusing on narrower problems because that's all the data and compute and tools that we had."
Today's convergence of massive computing power, huge datasets and sophisticated AI algorithms has created an environment where companies like Montai try to tackle problems at unprecedented scale.
The company has developed over 200 million molecular analogs inspired by natural compounds. These molecules are structurally unique from those in traditional synthetic libraries, providing potential solutions for disease targets previously considered "undruggable."
Biotech Innovation that Breaks from Traditional Paths
Georgiadis represents a shift in who can make meaningful contributions to biotech innovation. She’s optimistic that more industry outsiders will be able to contribute to the biopharma industry, as technology tools like AI expand the potential to identify and develop new therapies.
"When you don't come from the industry, sometimes you are unburdened with the bias of the many, many decades of training that you come with,” she said. “And you're willing to ask questions in contrarian ways. I look at my job as how do I understand the challenge of the scientists in creating amazing drugs and how do I use technology to break as many barriers as possible for them.”