AI Pharma Deals: Merck and AI Startups

Pharma and AI Drug Discovery

According to ResearchAndMarkets.com, the global AI in pharma market is expected to grow from $0.91 billion in 2020 to $1.27 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39%, eventually reaching $5.94 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 47% (Source).

Some of the major AI drug discovery players have being (so far) IBM Corporation, Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA Corporation, Atomwise, Deep Genomics, Cloud Pharmaceuticals, Insilico Medicine, BenevolentAI, Exscientia, Cyclica, BIOAGE, Numerate, NuMedii, Envisagenics, twoXAR, OWKIN, Inc., XtalPi, Verge Genomics and BERG LLC.

While the top 20 pharma companies (by 2020 revenue source) going after AI Drug Discovery are: Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Novartis, Merck & Co., AbbVie, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Sanofi, Takeda, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Eli Lilly & Co., Boehringer Ingelheim, Novo Nordisk, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Biogen and Astellas.

So far, most of these pharmas have either collaborated with/or acquired AI technologies (i.e. Pfizer and AI Startups, AstraZeneca and AI Startups,Bayer and AI Startups , Takeda and AI Startups, GSK and AI Startups, Roche (Genentech) and AI Startups, Novartis and AI Startups) in order to accelerate the drug development process.

Some examples (source) of these early-adopters-pharmas of AI drug discovery programs are: AstraZeneca that has collaborations with BERG, Renalytix AI, Mila - Quebec AI Institute and BenevolentAI; Pfizer that inked a strategic research collaboration with XtalPi, Insilico Medicine and ConcertAI; ConcertAI revealed also that is expanding its partnership with Janssen Research and Development (Johnson & Johnson); Janssen has also collaborated with Cambridge-based software solutions provider nference and Optellum a lung-health AI company; Boehringer Ingelheim that is working with Google Quantum AI and Insilico Medicine; BMS that has a $1.2 billion contract with Exscientia that is set to receive $20 million for the exploration work; GSK that has also collaborated with Exscientia to develop the first ever AI-powered treatment for Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); Exscientia that is also working with Roche, Sanofi and Bayer; and San Francisco-based Atomwise that has partnerships with Eli Lilly, Bayer and Bridge Biotherapeutics.

Among these selected recent deals, with a focus on applying AI in drug discovery (Tapping into the drug discovery potential of AI), you can find:

• AstraZeneca that partners with BenevolentAI to identify new drug candidates for chronic kidney disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. In January 2021, the companies announced a new drug target for chronic kidney disease, where BenevolentAI’s computers predicted the target and AstraZeneca’s experiments validated it.
• Exscientia that brings its AI drug discovery platform Centaur Chemist to a partnership with Rallybio to discover small-molecule drugs for rare diseases. And where it might have taken the traditional discovery process 4–5 years to come up with the drug candidate, while by harnessing Exscientia’s ‘Centaur Chemist’ AI it can be done within months.
• Bayer that collaborates with Exscientia to discover cardiovascular and oncology drug candidates using their AI drug discovery platform Centaur Chemist.
• Bayer that partners also with Recursion Pharmaceuticals in a drug development deal for new small-molecule therapies to treat fibrotic diseases using Recursion’s AI-guided drug discovery platform. This deal included a $30 million upfront payment, plus $100 million each for reaching milestones in up to ten drug discovery programs, making the deal potentially worth more than $1 billion. At the same time, Bayer’s investment arm, Leaps, contributed $50 million to Recursion’s $239 million Series D financing.
• J&J’s Janssen that partners with BioSymetrics and Sema4 in a collaboration that aims to apply ML to predict onset and severity of COVID-19 among different populations.
• Insitro that will use its ML technology Insitro Human platform to identify potential drug targets by developing predictive models of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia, and with Bristol Myers Squibb then choosing candidates to develop further. This 5-year development deal, provides a $50 million payment upfront and another $20 million for hitting certain milestones, with a total of up to $2 billion for future work, plus royalties on any drug sales.
• Genesis Therapeutics that partners with Genentech in a multi-target drug development deal using Genesis’ graph ML capabilities to identify drug candidates for a range of disorders. And
• Iktos that will apply its AI-driven de novo design software to a number of Pfizer’s small-molecule programs.

But let's see now Merck's partnerships for AI drug discovery programs.

Merck and AI

Just this week (14 October 2021), Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer and Teva partnered to launch AION Labs (Rehovot, Israel has been selected as its international headquarters), an innovative drug research project to produce AI and computational ventures to develop new pharmaceutical therapies.

And last week, on October 06, 2021, Syapse (a company marrying clinical expertise with smart technologies dedicated to extinguishing the fear and burden of serious disease by advancing real-world care), announced that it has entered into a research collaboration with Merck, to leverage real-world data to drive high-quality insights that will impact patient care and advance oncology research. Syapse utilises AI and natural language processing to accelerate the capture of unstructured data elements, while verifying reliability of the outputs against a source of truth. (Source)

This summer (source), Merck announced that it will work with McKesson's Ontada to conduct real-world evidence studies since Ontada has data from more than 2 million records and will allow Merck to explore new scientific data to improve patient outcomes and the quality of its cancer therapies. Ontada already works with the US Oncology Network, which taps into 1,400 independent physicians for value-based care.

Also this sumer, on June 25, 2021 Nucleai (a precision medicine company using AI-powered image analysis technology to support novel pathology-based biomarker development) announced that it has partnered with Merck, in order to leverage Nucleai's image analysis and biomarker discovery platform for several Merck's clinical stage oncology assets.

Just a year ago, in 2020, Insilico Medicine announced that Merck will be the first launch partner for its flagship generative chemistry AI platform-Chemistry42, and that Merck will integrate Chemistry42™ into its discovery pipeline to facilitate rapid and effective drug design.

Chemistry42™, core part of Insilico's Pharma AI drug discovery process, it is a user-friendly platform that bridges AI and ML methods with domain expertise in the fields of medicinal and computational chemistry, for the design of novel small molecules with desirable physicochemical properties.

Also in 2020, Iktos (a company utilising AI for new drug design based on deep generative models), announced a collaboration agreement with Merck. In this new collaboration, Iktos’ de novo generative design technology will be used in a structure-enabled context to facilitate the rapid and cost-effective design of an undisclosed Merck drug discovery program. Iktos markets its AI software or as a service (SaaS) software called Makya or as a AI SaaS platform called Spaya.

Moreover in 2020, Insitro (a ML driven drug discovery and development company) announced the appointment of Roger Perlmutter, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president and president of Merck Research Laboratories/ Merck’s global R&D organisation, as the company’s first independent board director.

In 2019, BioXcel Therapeutics (a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company utilising AI approaches for neuroscience and immuno-oncology drug development) announced the addition of Merck to its Nektar Therapeutics clinical collaboration to evaluate a novel triple combination therapy in pancreatic cancer (avelumab, BXCL701 and NKTR-214).

Avelumab is a human anti-programmed death ligand (PD-L1) co-developed and co-commercialized by Merck and Pfizer, BXCL701 is an orally-available systemic innate-immune activator that inhibits dipeptidyl peptidase (DPP) 8/9 and FAP developed by BioXcel and NKTR-214 is a CD122-biased agonist developed by Nektar.

In November 2019, Boston-based PathAI, (maker of AI tools for pathology) has capped off its Series B funding round with a $15 million strategic investment from the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Bristol-Myers Squibb, bringing the startup’s full round to $75 million, and its total funding to just over $90 million. And in May 2021, PathAI raised $165 million in a newly closed series C for its diagnostic and drug development software, in a financing that was co-led by D1 Capital Partners and Kaiser Permanente. Another dozen investors joined in the round, including Bristol Myers Squibb, Labcorp and Merck’s Global Health Innovation Fund.

Additionally in 2019, Merck KGaA has signed on to a collaboration with the Chinese internet giant Tencent, focused on developing digital, AI-based platforms (AI doctors) to help increase access to healthcare services and promote disease awareness.

In 2018, the pharma giant Merck revealed that has entred into a licensing deal with Cyclica Inc. to utilise Ligand Express, an in silico proteome screening platform. Ligand Express is an AI and structure-based augmented proteome screening platform, which helps in uncovering new targets for small molecules.

Merck also has a confidential project (2018) with Atomwise, a company that uses AI, specifically convolution neural networks, in order to assist with drug discovery efforts. Atomwise in 2020 scored a whopping $123 million in Series B funding led by B Capital Group and Sanabil Investments. DCVC, BV, Tencent, Y Combinator, Dolby Family Venture and AME Cloud Ventures also participated in the funding round.

Merck has also an early partnership with Numerate (a technology platform company that is leveraging proprietary algorithms and the power of cloud computing to transform the drug design process) which they announced in March 2012. The collaboration will utilise Numerate’s proprietary in silico drug design technology to generate novel small molecule drug leads for an undisclosed cardiovascular disease target.

Finally, an AI partnership between the two big pharma players Merck and Bayer has allowed the development of an AI-driven software that looks to redefine clinical decision-making of CTEPH, a rare form of pulmonary hypertension, a chronic condition that affects approximately 5 individuals per million annually around the globe. The software referred to as CTEPH Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence, received an FDA clearance (2018) to support radiologists detect this chronic condition.

Thank you for reading 👓💙

And if you liked this post why not share it?

#science #health #pharma #AI_drugdiscovery #drugdiscovery #AI #biotechAI #pharma_AI #startup