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Sanofi is investing in French American startup Owkin to assist drug discovery and improvement initiatives in 4 forms of most cancers.
The strategic collaboration entails a $180 million fairness funding into Owkin and a complete cost of $90 million over the following three years, along with milestone-based charges to be decided later.
“Owkin’s distinctive methodology, which applies AI on affected person information from partnerships with a number of tutorial medical facilities, helps our ambition to leverage information in modern methods in R&D,” mentioned Arnaud Robert, government vice chairman and chief digital officer at Sanofi, in an announcement.
Owkin, a precision drugs and synthetic intelligence firm, is thought for its skill to course of massive information units by predictive biomedical AI fashions. Its international analysis community is powered by federated studying, which permits information scientists to securely hook up with huge information units and practice AI fashions with out the necessity to pool data.
With this partnership, Sanofi can optimize its medical trials and establish predictive biomarkers for ailments and therapy outcomes, particularly in 4 unique forms of most cancers: triple-negative breast most cancers, non-small cell lung most cancers, a number of myeloma, and mesothelioma. Conversely, Sanofi’s funding will assist leverage the Owkin Platform, which endeavors to develop the most important histology and genomic most cancers database by amassing data from prime oncology facilities worldwide.
“Owkin’s mission is to enhance sufferers’ lives by utilizing our platform to find and develop the correct therapy for each affected person. This landmark partnership with Sanofi will see federated studying used to create analysis collaborations at a really unprecedented scale. The way forward for AI to remodel how we develop therapies is extremely brilliant, and we’re proud to accomplice with Sanofi on this mission,” commented Thomas Clozel, M.D., the co-founder and chief government of Owkin.
Owkin works with main most cancers facilities and pharmaceutical corporations within the U.S. and Europe. Its most notable tasks embody Healthchain, an AI-focused consortium funded by France’s Banque Publique d’Investissement, and MELLODDY (Machine Studying Ledger Orchestration for Drug Discovery), a machine studying program platform that shops information from totally different pharmaceutical corporations to assist corporations’ drug discovery efforts with out compromising privateness.
This isn’t the primary time the French biopharmaceutical firm has partnered with synthetic intelligence specialists to assist its analysis. In June this 12 months, Sanofi entered right into a similar agreement with one other AI agency CytoReason to faucet into the latter’s cell-centered fashions and deconvolution strategies to find new therapies for bronchial asthma in each youngsters and adults. CytoReason’s computational mannequin of the human physique can simulate illness on a mobile degree, permitting for extra correct human trials and decreasing the necessity to use animal fashions.
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