Insilico Medicine, an AI-based clinical-stage drug discovery company, announced a multi-year, multi-targeted strategic research collaboration with Sanofi on November 8. Under the terms of the agreement, which could be worth up to $1.2 billion, the collaboration will leverage Insilico Medicine’s AI platform, Pharma.AI, to advance drug development candidates for up to six new targets.

Sanofi wants to prioritize AI. Indeed, drug development is very time-consuming and expensive, AI can make the process faster, cheaper and more efficient: it facilitates the selection of patients for clinical trials, the search for active compounds for a given target and speeds up the analysis of biomedical information.

To remain competitive in a fast-changing environment, pharmaceutical companies are entering into agreements with start-ups, as Sanofi, the leading French pharmaceutical company, has just done with Insilico Medicine.

This new research collaboration follows several other announcements of AI-enabled drug discovery partnerships: a strategic multi-target research collaboration with Atomwise last August, the signing of a licensing agreement with Exscientia in January, and last year, Sanofi partnered with Owkin to fight cancer with AI and federated learning.

Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based startup, has developed AI platforms that use deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers and other modern machine learning techniques to discover new targets and design new molecular structures with desired properties. Its solutions are aimed at discovering and developing innovative drugs for cancer, fibrosis, immunity, central nervous system (CNS) and age-related diseases. In fact, its first AI-assisted drug discovery is currently being evaluated in a study of patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO and founder of Insilico Medicine, states:

“We are very pleased to collaborate with Sanofi, a company with a clear strategy in AI-based drug discovery This close collaboration will allow Sanofi to immediately acquire the capabilities of one of the largest AI startups in addition to enriching its drug discovery pipeline.”

A multi-year, multi-targeted strategic research collaboration

Under the terms of the agreement, Sanofi will pay Insilico Medicine a total of up to $21.5 million covering upfront and target appointment fees to leverage Insilico’s Pharma.AI platform and access a team of interdisciplinary drug discovery scientists to identify, synthesize and advance high-quality lead therapeutic compounds to the development candidate stage.

Additional payments will be made contingent upon the achievement of key research, development and sales milestones, which could total up to $1.2 billion. The collaboration also establishes medium to low tiered royalties for all products developed.

Translated from Insilico Medicine, la dernière start-up choisie par Sanofi pour accélérer la découverte de médicaments grâce à l’IA