Exscientia’s artificial intelligence technology has produced a new drug candidate for Sanofi for immunological applications. Now the pharmaceutical giant is turning to the company again, 100 million USD paid Pay cash up front to start a larger drug discovery alliance, covering immunology and cancer.
According to the terms of the agreement announced on Friday, Sanofi and Exscientia will jointly develop up to 15 new small molecule drugs. These molecules will come from Exscientia’s artificial intelligence platform at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Although the biotechnology company’s drug discovery method revolves around artificial intelligence, the work starts with human tissue.
According to Exscientia, disease models from cell lines, organoids, and mice may be affected by other factors that do not reflect the complexity and diversity of human diseases. The company uses human tissue as a model to generate data analyzed by its artificial intelligence technology to find biological indicators of disease, select the correct molecules to achieve these goals, and identify patients most likely to benefit from treatment. When announcing the new alliance, Exscientia founder and CEO Andrew Hopkins stated that testing candidate drugs against patient tissues may provide greater accuracy than mouse models.
When Sanofi and Exscientia first started working together in 2016, the focus was on finding targets for metabolic diseases. In 2019, Sanofi exercised its option on one of the goals set by Exscientia technology. The biotech company stated in its regulatory documents that the drug is a bispecific small molecule designed to address two different goals of inflammation and fibrosis. According to the development progress of the molecule, Exscientia can obtain milestone payments of up to $250 million.
The structure of the new alliance is similar, but involves more molecules. Sanofi and Exscientia will work together to determine and select their goals. According to the progress of the research, Exscientia can obtain milestone payments of up to US$5.2 billion. If Sanofi commercializes any drugs produced by the alliance, Exscientia will receive royalties from the sale of these drugs.
“The collaboration between Sanofi and Exscientia aims to change the way we discover and develop new small molecule drugs for the treatment of cancer and immune-mediated diseases,” said Frank Nestlé, Sanofi’s global research director and chief scientific officer, in a prepared statement Means in. “The application of sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning methods will not only shorten the time to drug discovery, but will also help design higher-quality and more targeted drugs for patients.”
Sanofi is just one of several partners that Exscientia has signed since its launch in 2012. The biotechnology company has formed alliances with Bristol Myers Squibb, Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, EQRx and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.But Exscientia is also eager to develop its own drug, the company Completed IPO in October to provide funding for the development of its preclinical and early clinical drug pipeline.
As far as Sanofi is concerned, it has been spreading its artificial intelligence bets. In November, the pharmaceutical giant made a US$180 million equity investment in artificial intelligence and precision medicine startup Owkin. In addition to this investment, Sanofi paid $90 million to the startup to start a three-year partnership focused on the development of new drugs for four types of cancer.
Photo: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images
