Last week, Sanofi announced a $180 million investment in Owkin. The French-American start-up, which specializes in AI and precision medicine, is building predictive artificial intelligence models applied to biomedicine. Sanofi and Owkin’s joint initiatives will be developed with a view to preserving the confidentiality of data from research institutions and hospitals, the two players said.

The new strategic collaboration will begin with an initial payment of $90 million over three years. The goal is to establish research and development programs for four forms of cancer in three major areas: lung cancer, breast cancer and multiple myeloma. This will optimize the design of clinical trials, as well as the detection of predictive biomarkers for disease and therapeutic outcomes.

Dr. John Reed, Ph.D., Sanofi’s Global Head of Research and Development, said:

“We look forward to collaborating with our colleagues at Owkin to analyze data from hundreds of thousands of patients. Sanofi’s investment in this company is a three-year agreement that will enable the discovery and development of new treatments for non-small cell lung cancer, triple negative breast cancer, mesothelioma and multiple myeloma. This partnership will accelerate our ambitious oncology program and the development of a rich pipeline to address unmet patient needs.”

In order for medical research to scale up through the use of artificial intelligence while maintaining privacy, Owkin has established a global research network based on federated learning. This allows for secure connection to decentralized multi-party datasets and the creation of artificial intelligence models without data pooling. This approach will allow Sanofi researchers to apply these advanced technology platforms to drug development for other cancers.

Arnaud Robert, executive vice president and chief digital officer of Sanofi explains:

“Owkin’s unique methodology, which amounts to applying artificial intelligence to patient data from partnerships with multiple academic hospitals, fits perfectly with Sanofi’s ambition to leverage data in innovative ways for its R&D activities. We strive to advance precision medicine and discover innovative therapeutic modalities with the greatest benefit to patients.”

Owkin’s comprehensive platform will make it easier for Sanofi to search for new biomarkers and therapeutic targets to develop prognostic models used to predict treatment response from multimodal patient data.

With this new equity investment, Owkin will continue its development and will be able to build a large database of cancer genomic data from major cancer centers.

For Thomas Clozel, Owkin’s CEO:

“Owkin’s mission is to improve the lives of patients and use its platform to discover and develop the right treatment for each patient. We believe that the future of precision medicine lies in technologies that can identify and analyze information from the vast amounts of patient data held by hospitals and research centers, securely and without compromising privacy.

This landmark partnership with Sanofi will provide an opportunity to apply federated learning to create research collaborations of unprecedented scale. The future ability of artificial intelligence to transform the way we develop medicines holds extraordinary promise and we are proud to partner with Sanofi to accomplish this mission.”

Translated from Sanofi et Owkin associés dans la lutte contre le cancer avec l’intelligence artificielle et l’apprentissage fédéré