OpenAI Foundation pays to mine bankrupt biotech firms for medical data

The OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit parent of OpenAI, is funding an effort to buy data from failed biotech companies to train medical AI systems. The initiative, part of a new program called Public Data for Health, gave $500,000 to 1Day Sooner, a clinical-trial advocacy group, to test whether it can acquire regulatory filings and safety data at bankruptcy auctions.

The idea began with Ruxandra Teslo, a policy analyst who focuses on clinical trials. Last year she proposed bidding at bankruptcy proceedings to obtain documents that biotech firms normally guard as trade secrets, including manufacturing strategies and safety data. She called the material “biotech’s lost archive.”

1Day Sooner’s president, Josh Morrison, says nonexclusive copies of a failed company’s datasets can sometimes be bought for “a few tens of thousands of dollars” each. His group already holds three datasets, two of them donated by Lumen Bioscience, a biotech that used the same Chapter 11 process, bankruptcy protection that lets firms reorganize rather than liquidate, to review a rival’s drug files. Two other bids this year did not succeed. The files 1Day Sooner is after are known as common technical documents, the paperwork drug regulators use for approval decisions. Teslo says roughly 70% of drug development time and money goes into organizing and running clinical trials, a process she describes as a black box for small biotech firms. She thinks an AI trained on enough of these documents could act as a copilot for navigating drug approval.

Money to give away

Public Data for Health also sent $40 million to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to collect data on cancer vaccines, and backed OpenAdmet, a group that runs competitions for predicting how drugs behave in the body. The OpenAI Foundation says it wants to give away $1 billion by the end of 2026, according to foundation executive Jacob Trefethen, who says the foundation operates separately from OpenAI’s commercial business.

The foundation holds a 26% stake in OpenAI, the company Sam Altman restructured from a nonprofit into a for-profit corporation now preparing a stock sale that could value it at $1 trillion. That stake could leave the foundation sitting on roughly $250 billion in stock, more than the $180 billion the Gates Foundation and its associated trust held at the end of 2025. So far its biggest single grant, $100 million, went in August to the Common Health Coalition, which helps patients get hepatitis C drugs.

Bankruptcy data is drawing interest beyond biotech. Google recently won a bid for the corporate data of failed airline Spirit Airlines, including 100 million emails, a deal that drew objections from flight attendants over exposure of private information. Whether 1Day Sooner wins its next bankruptcy bid, and whether biotech creditors raise objections like those at Spirit Airlines, will show whether the strategy can scale past its first three donated datasets.