Insilico Medicine announced a strategic research collaboration with Sanofi to advance drug development candidates for up to six new targets that could score the AI-driven drug discovery specialist up to $1.2 billion.
Under the terms of the a deal, Sanofi will pay Hong Kong-based Insilico a total of up to $21.5 million to benefit from Insilico’s end-to-end Pharma.AI platform and gain access to a team of interdisciplinary drug discovery scientists to identify, synthesize, and advance lead therapeutic compounds up to development candidate stage. Additional payments will be made if key research, development, and sales milestones are met, and could total up to $1.2 billion.
Insilico's platform is focused on three areas of drug discovery and development: disease target identification, generation of novel molecules data, and predicting clinical trial outcomes. Back in July, as part of a research collaboration with Answer ALS, Insilico identified multiple unreported potential therapeutic targets for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis using its proprietary AI-driven target discovery engine, PandaOmics.
For Sanofi, the pact is part of a larger AI push, which included a potential $5.2B deal with Exscientia back in January to use AI-based capabilities to develop novel small molecule candidates across oncology and immunology.
