AI Pharma Deals: Takeda and AI Startups

Takeda 💊 AI Partnerships 🤖

A GlobalData analysis showed that the number of pharma AI partnerships has risen significantly since 2015 and in particular in 2020 27 partnerships were identified in this field, that is an increase of 575% in the last six years (link).

Examples of leading AI Drug Discovery strartups operating in this space include Exscientia, Atomwise, Recursion Pharma, Iktos, Insilico Medicine, Sensyne Health, Insitro, BenevolentAI and many more.

When it comes for big pharmas, examples of actively pursuing AI innovative startups are Pfizer (AI Pharma Deals: Pfizer and AI Startups), AstraZeneca (AI Pharma Deals: AstraZeneca and AI Startups) and Bayer (AI Pharma Deals: Bayer and AI Startups) that lead the way in terms of the number of partnerships. Other pharmaceutical companies that have recently forged deals in this area include Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), Roche, Janssen, Merck KGaA, Boehringer Ingelheim, GSK and Sanofi. But today, we are going to talk about Takeda.

In 2020, MIT and Takeda began a partnership centered within the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic), with Takeda providing an initial three-year investment with the potential for a two-year extension to support 6-10 research projects per year, focusing on areas such as disease diagnosis, prediction of treatment response, biomarker development, drug discovery and clinical trial optimisation. With the collaboration, MIT will gain access to pharmaceutical infrastructure and expertise, and develop new educational program through J-Clinic that will support MIT faculty and researchers with AI development.

"The MIT-Takeda Program will build a community dedicated to the next generation of AI and system-level breakthroughs that aim to advance healthcare around the globe." — Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of MIT's School of Engineering

In 2020, Takeda launched a five-year transformation initiative—with the help from Accenture and Amazon Web Services—to establish an in-house digital engine. Takeda plans to move 80% of its drug development applications to the cloud and aims to hire hundreds into new roles specialised in digital fields.

“My vision is that, in less than 10 years, every Takeda employee will be empowered by an AI assistant to help make better decisions, enabling us to deliver transformative therapies and better experiences to patients, physicians and payers faster than previously possible.” — President and CEO Christophe Weber

In 2021, Takeda announced the opening of an incubation platform — TakedaSpark — in Shanghai China as part of its strategy to accelerate digital innovation practices for disease treatment and healthcare services. More than 100 local startups are expected to join the initial selection stage, and less than 10 projects might receive incubation funding support by the end of 2021. The company hopes to combine cutting-edge technologies such as AI, ML and smart IoT devices to improve the accuracy of disease screening and detection, while promoting digital healthcare solutions including digital therapy solutions. Additionally, Takeda will establish big data analysis and algorithm capabilities to gain insight into the needs of doctors and patients through big data, while improving precision marketing tools and overall efficiency.

"We hope to use flexible, innovative and high-quality products to provide better treatments for patients. Digitalisation will be an empowering tool to expedite our overall efficiency, and it's also crucial for how we connect with various stakeholders and collaborators." — Sean Shan, president of Takeda China, who is also a member of the company's leadership committee for Growth & Emerging Markets

Takeda and AI Startups 🤖

🖊🖥💊 In 2017, Recursion Pharmaceuticals announced the formation of a research collaboration agreement with Takeda Pharmaceutical. Under the terms of this collaboration, Recursion will utilize its discovery platform to provide pre-clinical candidates for Takeda's TAK-celerator™ development pipeline in the next year. Financial terms of the agreement include an upfront payment and success-based milestones of over $90 million💵 should the collaboration result in multiple new drug approvals, and single digit royalty payments on net sales.

"Takeda's TAK-celerator has demonstrated an unparalleled desire to innovate in the drug discovery and early development space, which aligns perfectly with Recursion's mission." — Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion

In less than two years, in January 2019, Takeda and Recursion announced progress in their collaboration. In their announcement, they reported that Recursion had evaluated compounds in over 60 indications during the prior 18 months, that resulted in new therapeutic candidates for more than 6 diseases. Takeda exercised its option for drug candidates in two rare diseases from these early results. Takeda and Recursion have also extended the partnership to enable additional discoveries to be made and evaluated by both teams, but financial details were not disclosed.

Recursion Pharmaceuticals 🚀 (Utah US, 2013) combines experimental biology, automation and AI in a massively parallel system to quickly and efficiently identify treatments for any disease. At Recursion’s headquarters, clusters of robots treat millions of cells per week with drugs, stain them with six dyes and then take pictures/images to capture and quantify as many morphological features as they can. By pushing these data through a ML pipeline, they hope to find relationships that are invisible to the human eye and to tease out clusters of effects that can guide their drug discovery efforts. On September 2020, Recursion secured $239 million in equity financing to advance its technology enabled Drug Discovery Platform and Pipeline. And on March 2021, Recursion has filed for an initial public offering, seeking to sell $100 million worth of shares. The company reported a net loss of $2.4 million, or $5.99💵 a share, on revenue of $4 million💵 in 2020, compared with a net loss of $4.30💵 a share on revenue of $2.3 million💵 in 2019. Recursion Pharmaceuticals has raised a total $465.4M💵.

🖊🖥💊 In 2017, Numerate and Takeda announced that they would collaborate on identifying candidates for oncology, gastroenterology and central nervous system disorders. Takeda has agreed to pay milestone payments and royalties to Numerate under the companies’ multiyear agreement.

“We expect to produce multiple clinical candidates, while also continuing to refine, validate, and expand our proprietary AI-driven platform as we work across a broad range of target types and drug design challenges.” — Numerate president and CEO Guido Lanza

Numerate 🚀 (San Francisco Bay Area, US 2007) is a group of cutting-edge scientists and engineers trying to solve very difficult problems at the interface of data science, ML, cloud scale analytics and medicinal chemistry. They developed a platform that can predict how a potential drug will behave in the lab and the body. Numerate has raised a total of $19.4M💵 in funding over 5 rounds and has a post-money valuation in the range of $50M to $100M💵 as of Jun 24, 2014. Numerate was acquired by Valo Health (that uses human-centric data and ML anchored computation to transform the drug discovery and development process) on Nov 1, 2019.

🖊🖥💊 In 2019, Image Analysis Group (“IAG”) announced a partnership in the field of ulcerative colitis (UC) histopathological image analysis with Takeda, in order to develop and validate an AI powered tool that will potentially allow gastroenterologists to effectively incorporate histology in their real-life assessment of people suffering from UC. The parties will focus on the validation of the use of deep learning models and the use of IAG’s methodologies and platform DYNAMIKA. DYNAMIKA (Certified: ISO13485, FDA510K, CE, 21 CFR Part 11), is IAG’s cloud platform for robust imaging data management in multi-centre trial setting and central review. Is a comprehensive software system to control trial progress, conduct central reads and when needed, use built-in AI for earlier read-outs and decision support. DYNAMIKA, so far has powered over 400 global clinical studies, to manage MRI, CT, X-ray, PET, immunoPET, SPECT, histology and fluoroscopy imaging.

“The success of patient treatment with novel therapeutic agents highly depends on the efficient use of modern technologies and data-centric development approaches. In such a critical area as IBD, our patients will no doubt will benefit from the use of Artificial Intelligence to augment clinical decisions." — Prof. Laurent Peyrin-Biroulet University Hospital of Nancy

Image Analysis Group (IAG) 🚀 (London UK, 2007) is an imaging expert company helps to accelerate novel drug development by using AI, ML and smart image analysis methods to ensure the speed and cost-effectiveness, while delivering true insights about your mechanism of action and patients’ response in real-time. IAG has raised a total of $5.2M💵.

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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

When the Pharma Giants Met the Tech Giants

Key AI players in the drug discovery market