LG AI Research Registers AI Patent to Accelerate New Materials and Drug Development

[Financial News] LG AI Research announced on the 3rd that it recently completed patent registration for Exaone Discovery, a core technology behind its "AI research colleague" platform.
Exaone Discovery is an AI-based platform for developing new materials and new drugs. It analyzes multimodal data in various forms, including research papers, patents, molecular structures, and images. By doing so, it can identify promising candidate substances at dozens of times the previous speed and dramatically shorten development timelines.
LG AI Research believes that this patent registration allows it to protect the entire research and development process for new substances as intellectual property, while also securing technological leadership.
In particular, the patent specifies, in its claims, the full sequence of methods and systems that extract molecular structures from unstructured documents, assign identifiers, predict specific labels based on researchers’ queries, design experiments, and predict new substances. Because of this, it is regarded as a "bottleneck patent" that is difficult to circumvent through simple algorithm tweaks. Even if competitors build AI models with similar performance, researchers would still need to manually input or link molecular structures and chemical formulas. LG AI Research assesses that this makes it hard for others to match Exaone Discovery’s core advantages in speed and convenience.
A representative from LG AI Research said, "To use a system where researchers can conveniently pose questions to an AI research colleague and check the results, it is essential to sign a patent license agreement with LG AI Research," adding, "This patent is a representative case in which LG has both implemented innovation that surpasses existing technologies and built an exclusive rights barrier to protect it."
LG is applying Exaone Discovery across a range of industries, including cosmetic ingredients, battery materials, and drug discovery. A representative example is the development of cosmetic ingredients, which requires repeated cycles of structural design, lab synthesis, and physical property testing.
Using Exaone Discovery, LG evaluated more than 40 million substances to determine whether the synthesized results would have the properties required for cosmetics, be easy to synthesize, and avoid generating harmful substances. A review process that previously took 22 months was completed in a single day. LG Household & Health Care is preparing to launch cosmetics based on new substances developed with this AI technology. LG plans to further develop Exaone Discovery into a leading "chemical agentic AI" that discovers breakthrough new materials capable of reshaping industries such as batteries, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals.
mkchang@fnnews.com Reporter Jang Min-kwon Reporter