Sanofi has entered into a multi-year agreement with France-based agentic AI company Owkin to jointly develop next-generation AI-driven biopharma agents. The partnership includes a five-year licence for Owkin’s K Pro platform, an advanced AI system designed to augment drug discovery and development across pharmaceutical workflows.
The two companies have maintained a working relationship since 2021, underpinned by a €90 million ($103.6 million) collaboration centred on oncology target identification and patient subgrouping. Over time, this scope broadened to include drug positioning within Sanofi’s immunology pipeline. This latest agreement represents the natural progression of that relationship, moving toward comprehensive AI integration across biopharma operations.
Under the new terms, Owkin will manage the end-to-end construction of new agentic AI tools specifically tailored to Sanofi’s operational requirements. These tools are designed to function as intelligent digital assistants, capable of autonomously handling complex tasks within drug research and development processes.
Deployed through the K Pro platform, the agentic AI for drug discovery will complement and reinforce Sanofi’s existing AI infrastructure. K Pro integrates multimodal patient datasets with dedicated biological AI systems, supporting pharmaceutical workflows from early-stage discovery through to clinical development. The platform is built to enhance competitive intelligence, enable faster and more informed decision-making, and improve accuracy across the industry value chain.
Owkin CEO and co-founder Thomas Clozel stated: “Building on our collaboration with Sanofi, this marks a shift toward truly embedded AI. Owkin believes that, with K Pro, Sanofi can further harness agentic systems within their own workflows, unlocking the full value of their data to accelerate better decisions across drug development.”
Sanofi Chief Digital Officer Emmanuel Frenehard added: “Across Sanofi, we are continually investing in frontier AI solutions with the potential to accelerate and improve decision-making throughout the drug development life cycle. By implementing purpose-built agentic systems into our workflows, we aim to empower our teams to operate with greater speed, depth, and confidence as we continue to work to deliver transformative outcomes for patients.”
The continued development of K Pro aligns with Owkin’s broader goal of achieving biological artificial superintelligence, with the aim of transforming pharmaceutical research and development by addressing previously unsolved scientific challenges and driving future drug discoveries. The agentic AI for drug discovery approach embedded in this partnership reflects the company’s long-term ambition to reshape how the biopharma sector operates at its most fundamental level.
Separately, Sanofi recently received a priority review from the US Food and Drug Administration for its new drug application for venglustat, an oral glucosylceramide synthase inhibitor intended for the treatment of type 3 Gaucher disease.
