About Virtual Labs
The future of drug discovery
starts with behavior.
Virtual Labs builds AI-native instruments that capture mouse behavior at a resolution no human observer could ever score, 8,075 data points every second. Better data reduces the number of animals needed.
Better data. Better drugs. Fewer animals.
A New Measurement Paradigm
Data no human eye
could ever capture.
For a century, behavior has been scored with a stopwatch and a clipboard. We record it the way physics records an experiment: every frame, every keypoint, every change in the room.
every second
for stride-level kinematics
body, head, tail and face
invisible to mice
synchronized to every frame
Why It Changes Everything
Nine in ten drugs fail in the clinic.
We’re going after why.
Behavioral studies are the last checkpoint before human trials, and they still run on human judgment. Fix that measurement and you don’t improve one study. You change the odds for every drug that follows.
Machine vision replaces the observer. Every frame is scored the same way in every lab, and the subtle signals that separate a working drug from a failed one finally make it into the data.
Identical capture physics and one data schema mean studies from any lab can be compared, combined and built on, for the first time at scale.
Hand-scored data is noisy, so studies add animals just to see a real effect. Better data reduces the number of animals needed to reach a clear answer.
The Founder
He helped settle a century-old debate in neuroscience. Now he’s rebuilding how behavior is measured.
Founder and CEO David Roberson, PhD, MBA, has spent two decades making discoveries with instruments he invented himself. In Clifford Woolf’s lab at Harvard Medical School, he built his own observation devices and used them to show, as first author in Nature Neuroscience (2013), that pain and itch are signaled by distinct nerve fibers. The finding helped settle a century-old debate and pointed to a way to silence itch selectively.
Then he turned discoveries into companies, six of them. He co-founded Blue Therapeutics and Nocion Therapeutics, where he co-invented assets now in Phase 2b clinical trials; Crimson Scientific, which built behavioral equipment for neuroscience labs; and Cacti Therapeutics, which is developing nociplastigens for chronic pain. He also led a machine vision company that automated one of neuroscience’s most widely used assays. He designs the optics, mechanical CAD and circuit boards himself. Virtual Labs brings it all together: a scientist, inventor and drug developer building the tools the field has been missing.
“Every part of my career has been preparing me for this work.”
Nature Neuroscience
from 4,000+ PhD students
assets he co-invented
companies he co-founded
or co-founded
Two Decades of Invention
Every breakthrough began with an instrument he built.
2009
2014
2025
Next: Virtual Labs. The best of his ideas, built into one system.
What We Build
An instrument and a dataset, built as one.
PolarEye™ captures behavior at 95 frames per second in 5MP, under 850nm near-infrared light invisible to mice, with 22 environmental measurements synchronized to every frame.
Real-time pose estimation runs on the camera itself: edge AI tracks 85 anatomical keypoints in every frame as it’s recorded, with no external computer needed.
Identical capture physics and one data schema mean results from any lab can be compared and combined. Better data reduces the number of animals needed.
How We Work
Bold ambition.
Rigorous science.
We say exactly what our tools can and can’t do. No assay ships until it’s benchmarked against more than 30 years of published pharmacology.
Experimental data is safe, secure and always owned by the lab that collected it.
Better data reduces the number of animals needed. We design every instrument to get clearer answers from each study.
Join Us
Help us change how
medicines are discovered.
Whether you run a lab, want to build with us, or want to share this story, we’d love to hear from you.