Key Points
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Absci uses generative AI to design protein drugs before they are tested in a lab.
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Partnerships with Merck and Owkin validate Absci’s hybrid AI-wet-lab drug platform.
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Long-term upside with this ticker depends on clinical success, royalties, and AI platform scalability — it is worth the risk.
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If I had to pick one artificial intelligence (AI) stock to buy today, bury in a time capsule, and not peek at again until 2036, I wouldn’t choose a chip designer or a model-maker. I wouldn’t choose Nvidia, Nebius Group, or any other sexy, hot name right now. Those businesses are great, but they operate in a world where the technology frontier shifts every year and competition is relentless.
The one I’d pick is a company quietly trying to change how we discover medicines in the first place. That company is Absci Corp. (NASDAQ: ABSI).
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Absci’s bet: Make biology “programmable”
Absci bills itself as a “data-first generative AI drug creation company,” which sounds like buzzword soup until you dig into what it actually does. Instead of starting with a promising molecule and then testing it endlessly in the lab, Absci starts with a disease target and uses generative AI to design potential protein-based drugs in silico — on the computer — before they ever hit a petri dish.
Its Integrated Drug Creation platform combines deep learning models with a high-throughput wet lab, enabling it to both design and experimentally validate its AI-created drug candidates. Absci’s long-term vision is deceptively simple: Go from a target to a viable biologic drug sequence “with the click of a button,” and then iterate until the candidate has the right mix of potency, safety, and manufacturability. To me, that’s the kind of ambition that makes sense on a 10-year-plus timeline, not a 10-quarter one.
Image source: Getty Images.
This isn’t a new pivot. Years ago, Absci acquired Denovium, a deep-learning company that uses AI to accelerate advances in biopharmaceutical research and gene discovery and folded that technology into what is now its AI engine. The company has been building toward this moment for a while.
Letting the partners tell the story
You can learn a lot about a small company by looking at who chooses to work with it. Absci’s partner list is unusually strong for its size, spanning big pharma, technology-driven biology companies, and top-tier academic centers.
Back in 2022, Absci announced a research collaboration with Merck to apply its platform to new biologic candidates — a vote of confidence from one of the most sophisticated research and development (R&D) organizations in the world. In 2023, it signed a strategic R&D partnership with PrecisionLife to co-develop potential therapeutics in complex chronic diseases, explicitly linking PrecisionLife’s computational patient stratification with Absci’s AI drug design engine.
In early 2025, Absci teamed up with Owkin, another technology-driven biology company using advanced AI to unlock difficult drug targets, to co-develop immuno-oncology and immunology candidates by combining both companies’ platforms. Owkin describes its own work as “agentic AI” for biology, which makes this pairing feel less like a simple licensing deal and more like two specialized tools being welded together into a larger system.
Building its own pipeline, not just renting out the tools
Absci isn’t just a services shop. It’s also advancing its own pipeline of AI-designed biologic drug candidates as a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical and healthcare company. That dual identity matters as we look ahead to 2036: If even one homegrown program makes it through the clinical maze, the upside isn’t just milestone payments from partners, it’s potential royalty or product economics on a drug the platform designed from scratch.
The company’s messaging has shifted toward “breakthrough therapeutics designed with generative AI,” a subtle but important change from being just a discovery partner. It suggests management is deliberately keeping some of the best shots on goal in-house rather than monetizing everything through collaborations.
Why a 2036 time capsule, specifically?
I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a real risk here. Drug discovery is brutal. Some of Absci’s partnerships have their flaws, and many programs fail late. Regulatory standards are high, as they should be. And layering AI on top of biology doesn’t magically remove any of that. Absci will likely issue more shares over time to fund its operations, and some investors will never be comfortable with that.
But this is exactly why I’d frame Absci as a time capsule stock. In my view, the market is structurally poor at valuing platforms whose payoffs are nonlinear and far in the future. It can price a single drug just fine; it struggles to price a system that could, in theory, generate dozens of drugs over a decade. Right now, Absci looks like a small, speculative AI biotech with an interesting story. By 2036, it will either be a much larger company with a network of royalty streams and owned products flowing from its platform, or an expensive lesson in why biology resisted another wave of technological optimism.
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Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Merck and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
