A.B. MODI
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Notes on Pharma 5.0, GxP-ready AI and the open-source bench tools we build at Ligant, first published on LinkedIn. Newest first.

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What if the hardest part of AI in pharma isn't the AI?

I've spent months trying to answer one question: how do we actually build Pharma 5.0?

I worked through the FDA and EMA principles, built tools at the bench, read through industry forums, and talked with people in quality, IT, science, and regulatory.

What I found surprised me.

My first draft was all about controlling the machine.

Then I realized you don't collaborate with a cage.

So I rewrote it.

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The result is seven principles for humans and machines working together responsibly.

I'll be honest: this is preliminary, independent, and I'm sure parts of it are wrong.

That's why I'm sharing it now.

I need your help to make it better.

Read it, then tell me which principle you'd challenge and what I've missed.

ArticleHow Do We Build Pharma 5.0? Seven Principles for Humans and Machines Working Together

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In the age of AI, software is not the commodity.

Humans are.

Sit with that for a second, because it sounds backwards.

For decades, software was the scarce thing.

It took teams, years, and serious budgets to build.

That's ending.

Today, anyone can describe a tool in plain English and have working code by the afternoon.

So if software is becoming abundant, what becomes scarce?

Here's where I land.

AI produces outputs.

Drafts, analyses, code, conclusions.

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It produces more of them, faster, than any team ever could.

But an output is not an answer.

Someone still has to check it.

Someone has to know which failures matter.

Someone has to decide whether a number is right, or whether it should not be reported at all.

And someone has to stand behind it when a regulator or a reviewer asks the hard question.

That someone is a human.

We usually hear "commodity" and think cheap and interchangeable.

But the original commodities were the things every economy ran on.

Grain, oil, steel.

The things nothing works without.

In the age of AI, that's human judgment.

The value isn't in the human who produces the output, because the model does that now.

The value is in the human who verifies it.

I spend my days building tools for cell and gene therapy research, where a confident wrong number is worse than no number at all.

That work has made one thing very clear to me.

The more AI we use, the more valuable the people who check it become.

Software is becoming abundant.

Judgment you can hold accountable is not.

Is that the right way to see it, or am I missing something?

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It's Thursday, and here's another lab spreadsheet we turned into a free, open-source tool.

One more step towards Pharma 5.0, which to me means software that does the checkable work and shows it, so the scientist stays in charge.

So what does this one do?

A lot of lab reagents arrive as a tiny vial of dry powder.

Before you can use it, you add liquid to dissolve it.

How much liquid you add decides how strong the solution is, and every experiment after that depends on it.

The maths is one simple division.

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The tricky part is the label.

"1 mg" might mean 1 mg of the thing you want, or 1 mg of everything in the vial, stabilizers included.

And the powder takes up space once it dissolves, so 1 mL of liquid doesn't give you 1 mL of solution.

Imagine a recipe asking for a cup of chocolate when the bag you bought is half sugar.

You measure perfectly, the cake still comes out wrong, and nothing on the plate tells you why.

A spreadsheet just does the division.

This tool asks what the label number really means before it gives you an answer.

Then it writes your answers next to the result, so whoever uses that solution later knows how it was made.

Here's why that matters: a wrong solution looks exactly like a right one.

It runs in your browser, nothing you type leaves it, and there's no account to create.

It's for research use only.

Is there a calculation in your lab you've stopped trusting?

Tell me which one, because that's how we pick what to build next.

Ligant post1 mg on the label. Is it 1 mg of your antibody?

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I think this short film has summarized it well. Must watch!

FilmSeat at the Table | Inside the AI Labs | Short Film (2026)

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It's Thursday, and here is another open-source bench tool from Team Ligant that replaces Excel.

This one is called the Dilution Planner.

Scientists dilute liquids all the time, a bit like adding water to juice to make it less strong.

The math is simple, so most people do it quickly in a spreadsheet or on a scrap of paper.

But sometimes the math gives an answer nobody can actually measure out.

Think of a recipe that asks for a tiny fraction of a single drop.

The number is correct, but no one can measure it.

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A spreadsheet prints that number anyway and says nothing.

Our tool stops and tells you why it won't work.

If there is a way around the problem, it shows you the extra step.

If there isn't, it says so plainly instead of guessing.

It also asks what you mean before it does any math.

"Make it up to 100" can mean three different things, and each one gives a different answer.

It then shows you the amount you asked for and the amount you will really end up with.

So who is it for?

Anyone who mixes solutions at a lab bench.

Students learning the basics, researchers running experiments, and lab leads who check other people's work.

It's free, and there's no sign-up.

It runs in your web browser, and what you type is never sent to us.

The code is public, so anyone can check how it works.

The link is in the first comment.

Try it with a dilution you think is simple, and tell me what happens.

Ligant postMost dilution calculators tell you what to pipette. This one also tells you when you cannot.

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Every frontier AI lab is racing to be first. But who is this race actually for?

In this article, I share why I think the race benefits us less than we're told, and what we can do instead: slow down, build governance and proper guardrails, and keep humans at the center with AI supporting decisions, not making them.

I also walk through the 10 FDA–EMA principles for good AI practice in my own words, and why I believe every industry, not just pharma, should adopt them.

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And one practical step: rely on private, local, open-source AI where you can, so power doesn't sit in the hands of a few companies.

(Yes, the image is AI-generated. The race isn't.)

ArticleThe Race Is Real, but the Image Is Not

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A vendor's "5 µL per test" leaves out two things: the volume and the cell number.

We built a free calculator that won't give you a titration series until you've written both down, along with two other conditions that change what the number means.

It shows its working, lists fourteen things it cannot detect, and nothing you enter leaves your browser.

I would rather ship a tool that refuses to guess than one that hands you a confident wrong number.

Please tell me which calculation you want next.

Ligant postA vendor recommendation of 5 µL per test tells you little until you know the volume of the test.

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A molecular weight is one of the easiest numbers in a workflow to get wrong, because nothing about a wrong one looks wrong.

Type 150,000 into a spreadsheet, and you get a clean answer back. The sheet never asks where that weight came from, or whether it is the mass of the assembled antibody, one subunit, or the conjugate. A subunit mass used where the assembled mass belonged is off by a factor of two or four. In every one of those cases, the output looks perfectly reasonable.

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The Molarity Converter for Biologics will not return anything until all three questions are answered. "Not recorded" is an accepted answer for provenance, and it prints on the output. That is the point of it.

Free, open source under Apache 2.0, runs entirely in your browser. No account, no data collection. Research use, not qualified for GxP decision-making.

Built with AI assistance. I set the question and signed off on what shipped.

Ligant postConverting nM to µg/mL requires a molecular weight, and in practice that weight is guessed.

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Everyone has a calculator. Almost nobody has a checker.

If you convert flow cytometry brightness into antigen density, you already have a way to do it. A vendor template, or a spreadsheet you've used for years. It works.

Here's the part that took us a while to see.

That spreadsheet will give you an answer no matter what you feed it: wrong bead lot. Columns pasted the wrong way round. Antibody from the wrong animal. A sample brighter than your brightest bead.

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Every one of those produces a confident number, and the checks you'd normally run come back clean.

One has an R² of exactly 1.000 and reports every value four times too low. Another gives statistics numerically identical to a correct calibration while every number is off by 30%.

Not similar. Identical.

So we built the thing that sits next to the calculator rather than replacing it. Same arithmetic, but it checks whether the calibration underneath is sound, and when it isn't, it refuses to print the number rather than printing it with a warning nobody reads.

Free, runs in your browser, nothing you type leaves your machine.

Check out the free tool here: https://lnkd.in/gcwqJYED

P.S. This is what I mean by "Pharma 5.0. Human-Machine Collaboration." Not machines making the call. Machines do the work of assembling the evidence and are honest about where that evidence runs out, so the scientist can make a better decision than they could alone.

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Testing a calculator is easy. You check the arithmetic and move on.

That was never the risk here. The risk was the tool confidently reporting a number when its underlying calibration was broken.

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So we tested for failure instead of correctness. We built calibrations in which we already knew the true answer, then measured how far the tool could be off. We rebuilt the whole calculation a second time in a different language and ran both against the same inputs, because reading code tells you what you meant to write, not what you wrote. And we attacked the live site directly, because the version people actually use is the one that matters.

That found three real defects. One had been live for three days. None were caught by reading the code, and none by the existing tests.

All three slipped through because our fixtures assumed the data would be tidier than real data is.

The tool is free and runs in your browser. Try to break it, and tell me where it gives way: benchtools.ligant.ai

Ligant postWe broke four bead calibrations on purpose. R² passed three of them.

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The framework

Seven Principles for Pharma 5.0

An independent framework for human and machine collaboration in regulated drug development, aligned with the FDA and EMA guiding principles for AI.

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