Insilico Medicine has gone ahead with a multi-year research and development – R&D collaboration with Servier, of almost $888m, in order to develop and discover certain new oncology therapies. The partnership combines the AI drug discovery platforms of Insilico along with the expertise that Servier holds in cancer drug development, with an objective to address the steep targets within the oncology field.
As per the agreement, Insilico is going to receive almost $32m in upfront as well as near-term research payments.
The company is going to lead the development of its AI technologies in order to discover and also progress potential drug candidates that go on to meet the defined scientific and also development criteria. Servier is going to share R&D expenditures and, once the promising molecules get identified, will lead the clinical validation, along with regulatory processes as well as global commercialization of the oncology candidates that come out.
It is well to be noted that Insilico has gone on to develop an oncology pipeline with an intent to focus on new oncology therapies that target many cancer indications through using both new and established mechanisms. Through employing advanced AI as well as automation technologies, Insilico has decreased the timelines pertaining to early-stage drug discovery.
Right from 2021 to 2024, it went on to nominate 20 preclinical candidates, having an average time from project start to preclinical candidate of around 12 to 18 months for every programme, thereby synthesizing as well as testing about 60 to 200 molecules across every programme.
Alex Zhavoronkov, the Insilico Medicine founder as well as CEO, upon this development has gone on to remark that he is indeed excited to witness the collaboration, as this is yet another robust acknowledgement of their AI capacity along with R&D expertise.
He added that as they further deepen the integration of generative AI across each and every stage of the pharma value chain, he believes that the future when it comes to pharmaceutical superintelligence has never been so close, where the AI agents could go on to actually make the decisions and also design the experiments, thereby throttling a virtuous cycle of rapid, smart, and also safe drug development.
