AI Pharma Deals: Roche (Genentech) and AI Startups

Roche (Genentech) data-centric drug discovery

According to a report by Grand View Research, Inc. the global AI in drug discovery market size (240 AI startups, 600 investors, 90 corporations) is expected to reach USD 3.5 billion💵 by 2027, expanding at a CAGR of 28.8%. Right now, half of the world’s AI drug discovery startups have their headquarters in US, follows UK, EU, Canada and Asia currently has the fifth-lowest proportion of AI for drug discovery startups.

Nevertheless, even though AI has transformed many areas this is not yet entirely true for drug discovery. In fact, some scientists point out to the importance of these tools and others remain very sceptical, waiting first for a clear "aha moment of digital transformation" to be shown in drug discovery. But as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, namely is clear by now that AI is providing new innovative tools for saving costs and increasing opertional efficiency during drug discovery, even though we haven't seen yet biomedical technologies, procedures and conditions as seen in the Star Trek.

So, today I am going to talk about Roche and its data centric drug discovery innovation pathaway towards a more AI-centric future, where high performance computer, ML and Deep Learning are drivers used by Roche to enable digital transformation of Roche's entire Pharma value chain.

Let's see now Roche's AI Drug Discovery startups (and institutes) partnerships 🕵🏻

🖊🖥💊 In 2020, Hoffmann-La Roche Limited (Roche Canada) launched the Roche AI Centre of Excellence (CoE), the first such collaborative centre to combine the expertise of all three national AI institutes under the CIFAR Pan-Canadian AI Strategy - Amii, Mila and the Vector Institute. The CoE focuses on advancing AI based digital solutions that optimise and reduce the cost of healthcare delivery and improve health outcomes.

"Artificial Intelligence cuts across many areas of innovation and has potential to transform how we live, work and play. I would like to congratulate Roche on this important AI initiative. Collaborations like the new AI in Health Centre of Excellence underscore the importance of our Government's $125 million💵 investment in the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, ensuring Canada remains a world leader in AI innovation, while attracting and retaining top talent and advancing Canadians' health and wellness." – The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry

🖊🖥💊 In 2017, Genentech a member of the Roche Group announced their collaboration with Cambridge, MA-based GNS Healthcare. Genentech plans to use the GNS REFS™ (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation) causal machine learning and simulation platform to find and validate potential new oncology drug candidates. The companies will also collaborate to unlock knowledge from various data resources such as longitudinal electronic medical records (EMR records), next generation sequencing, and other ‘omic data.

"As the race to match patients with the right therapies continues, pharmaceutical companies are looking for innovative approaches to harness the unprecedented volume of data at their fingertips.” — Iya Khalil, PhD, Chief Commercial Officer and Co-Founder of GNS Healthcare

GNS Healthcare 🚀 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, 2000) focuses on advancing and applying industrial-scale data analytics to empower key healthcare stakeholders to solve complex care, treatment and cost challenges. They are a multi-disciplinary group of physicists, actuaries, geneticists, engineers, business people and computer scientists. The company has just unveiled the first in silico multiple myeloma patient called Gemini. The in silico multiple myeloma patient is a computer model of disease progression and drug response at the individual patient level. GNS Healthcare has raised a total of $77.3M💵 in funding over 10 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jul 9, 2019 from a Series D round and a post-money valuation in the range of $100M to $500M💵 as of Jul 10, 2019, according

🖊🖥💊 In 2020, Genesis Therapeutics announced that it has entered into a multi-target collaboration agreement with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group. The collaboration leverages Genesis’ graph ML and drug discovery expertise to identify innovative drug candidates. Genesis will receive an upfront payment and is eligible to receive pre-clinical, clinical and regulatory milestone payments, as well as future royalties on Genentech’s sales of approved drugs resulting from the collaboration.

“This partnership with Genentech enables us to leverage our AI technology platform with Genentech’s unmatched capabilities in molecular innovation and structural biology.” — Evan Feinberg, Ph.D., Genesis co-founder and CEO

Genesis Therapeutics 🚀 (South San Francisco, California, United States 2019) is a privately-held company inventing and deploying state-of-the-art AI techniques to augment drug discovery and development. They are combining novel deep neural networks, biophysical simulation and massively scalable computing infrastructure to achieve industry-leading performance in a molecular generation and property prediction. Genesis Therapeutics has raised a total of $56.1M💵 in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Dec 2, 2020 from a Series A round.

🖊🖥💊 In 2019, Sensyne Health plc (LSE: SENS), the British clinical AI technology company, announced it has signed a research project with Roche, focused on identifying patient populations in one disease area and assessing and collating anonymised patient data with anonymised electronic patient record (EHR) information to support clinical trial planning.

“This is an important collaboration and marks Sensyne’s increasing activity in partnering with leading pharmaceutical companies using our clinical AI platform. It is particularly pleasing given Roche’s progressive approach to data and technology-driven personalised healthcare.” — Paul Drayson, Ph.D., CEO of Sensyne

Sensyne Health 🚀 (Founded Date 2018, Headington, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom) creates value from accelerating the discovery and development of new medicines and improving patient care through the analysis of real-world evidence from large databases of anonymised patient data in collaboration with NHS Trusts. Sensyne Health has raised a total of £27.5M💵 in funding over 1 round. This was a Post-IPO Equity round raised on Dec 9, 2020. Sensyne Health is registered under the ticker LSE:SENS and their stock opened with £1.75💵 in its Aug 16, 2018 IPO.

🖊🖥💊 In 2018, Roche started working with Owkin, using its data-driven machine learning platform for medical research.

Qwkin's 🚀 (New York, New York, United States 2016) mission is to use ML to develop better drugs for patients. They offer:

• Owkin Loop that connects medical researchers with high-quality datasets from leading academic research centers around the world and powered by the two main components of Owkin’s Software Stack: Owkin Studio and Owkin Connect. Owkin Studio, is designed for medical researchers to apply AI to their research cohorts and scientific questions. And Owkin Connect enables the secure and federated training and validation of AI techniques over the Loop.
• Owkin Lab, that is an in-house award-winning interdisciplinary team of data and biomedical scientists, that collaborate with partners to train AI models and design bespoke, end-to-end research solutions to meet their needs.

Owkin’s researchers have a number of papers and in their paper on Nature communications (August 2020) they presented a DL model to predict RNA-Seq expression of tumours from whole slide images. The test is called HE2RNA. Owkin has raised a total of $74.1M💵 in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jul 1, 2020 from a Series A round and has a post-money valuation in the range of $100M to $500M💵 as of Jul 1, 2020,

🖊🖥💊 In 2020, Reverie Labs announced a multi-target collaboration agreement with Roche and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group. Reverie Labs will use its unique technology platform to perform virtual screening, hit-to-lead generation, and lead optimisation on several kinase inhibitor discovery Roche and Genentech programs. Reverie Labs will receive an upfront payment and is eligible to receive pre-clinical, clinical, and regulatory milestone payments, as well as tiered royalties on Roche's sales of drug candidates produced by the collaboration.

"Under this collaboration, we are excited to apply our best in class technology and multi-disciplinary expertise to build and optimize compounds across several drug discovery programs. It is a privilege to begin a long-term partnership with Roche's and Genentech's successful R&D organizations to develop life-changing medicines with the potential to transform patient care." — Jonah Kallenbach, CEO and founder of Reverie Labs

Reverie Labs 🚀 (Boston, Massachusetts, United States 2017) accelerates preclinical drug development by applying ML to lead generation and optimisation. They develop state-of-the-art deep learning based model architectures to predict important molecular properties for lead discovery and optimisation and they use large-scale distributed training and transfer learning to build special-purpose models. They regularly enumerate and screen virtual libraries of millions to billions of compounds for lead optimisation and they use state of the art retrosynthesis and reaction planning methods to accelerate preclinical discovery in early- and late-stage compounds. They are a cloud-first company. And their data scientists can rapidly train models on thousands of machines, and their medicinal chemists can enumerate, search, and prioritise millions of compounds every week, allowing us to iterate incredibly quickly. Reverie Labs has raised a total of $25M💵 in funding over 2 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Feb 3, 2021 from a Series A round, led by Ridgeback Capital Investments, with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Neo, and other existing investors.

🖊🖥💊 In 2018, Roche and Genialis announced a partnership to help biologists tackle any issues "in the kingdom" of the RNA-sequencing and analysis workflow-related issues. As part of the agreement, the new RNA sequencing analysis workflow integrates Roche's KAPA RNA HyperPrep Kits — a single-day RNA-seq library preparation that improves the efficiency and sensitivity of sequencing low-input samples — with Genialis' software platform.

"The insights researchers can derive from high-throughput RNA sequencing data are critical to furthering the advancement of drug discovery and precision medicine. Through this partnership, researchers will have much more control over their data and be able to quickly generate and disseminate actionable information to push their research forward." — Genialis Cofounder and CEO Rafael Rosengarten

Genialis 🚀 (Texas US, 2011) uses AI to analyse multi-omics next-generation sequencing data allowing researchers to reveal previously unseen patterns across large, heterogeneous datasets to predict targets and biomarkers. Over the course of the year, Genialis initiated collaborations with numerous cutting edge biopharma, including Checkmate Pharmaceuticals and Oncologie, as well as renowned biotechnology leader Thermo Fisher Scientific. With partners like Checkmate and Oncologie, as well as others, the goal has been to leverage RNA sequencing and clinical trial outcomes data to model gene signatures that stratify patients based on predicted drug response. Moreover, Genialis and Thermo Fisher Scientific struck up a collaboration to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive set of tools for RNA sequencing. Genialis has raised a total of $2.5M💵 in funding over 3 rounds and has a post-money valuation in the range of $1M to $10M💵 as of Nov 13, 2017.

🖊🖥💊 In 2019, Oxford-based Exscientia announced a partnership with Roche worth up to €60M. Exscientia Ltd. agreed to use its artificial AI drug discovery platform Centaur Chemist to discover preclinical candidates for Roche.

"The application of AI into early stage drug discovery has the potential to offer transformational benefits in terms of productivity and quality to the generation of new medicines. Increasingly, we are seeing in our own pipeline projects and with our ongoing collaborations, the success of our AI platform in drug discovery. This new partnership with Roche demonstrates the value of our AI-driven platform and its potential to deliver high value assets. We are very pleased to begin this exciting project with such a respected partner." — Andrew Hopkins, CEO of Exscientia

Exscientia Ltd 🚀(Oxford UK, 2012) is the first company to automate drug design and its knowledge-driven systems (Centaur AI, as well as AI Pharmatech platforms) design millions of novel, project-specific compounds and pre-assess each for predicted potency, selectivity, ADME and other key criteria. From this, a selection of the best, information-rich compounds are selected for synthesis and assay. In March 2021, Exscientia announced it has raised $100 million💵 in a Series C financing round (a total of $147.9M💵), by BlackRock, as well as existing investors, including Evotec, Bristol Myers Squibb and Novo Holdings, the last of which led the first Series C. Exscientia has acquired Kinetic Discovery Ltd. on Nov 15, 2018, a company that offers drug discovery services as hit identification, confirmation and validation.

🖊🖥💊 Finally in 2021 (January), Roche partnered up with Cambridge Quantum Computing on next-generation quantum algorithms for early-stage drug discovery and development. This is a multi-year collaboration agreement based on further refinement and use of Cambridge Quantum’s EUMEN platform for quantum chemistry.

Cambridge Quantum Computing CQCL 🚀(Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom 2014) develops tools for the commercialisation of quantum computers by understanding quantum protocols and also quantum algorithms. Has published widely in the area of quantum chemistry and has made a number of quantum chemistry hires, adding to its existing team of over 70 quantum computing and application area specialists. The company has backing (including a $45 💵 million round from investors, including Honeywell Ventures and IBM Ventures, among others) to continue hiring and pushing for broader relationships in the pharma industry. Cambridge Quantum Computing has raised a total of $72.8M💵 in funding over 7 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Dec 8, 2020 from a Venture - Series Unknown round.

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👉🏻References

43 Pharma Companies Using Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery

AI-biotech startups: top five major deals

AI Drug Development Startups

Key AI players in the drug discovery market