AstraZeneca investing up to $250m in AI design of antibody to fight cancer
It has already been shown that AI has the design capability. Now AstraZeneca is bidding to prove it.
No specific area of oncology has been reported to date for the venture, although breast cancer is reportedly a prime area for such action.
The Cambridge Biomedical Campus company is funding the venture with the NASDAQ-quoted American AI biologics specialist Absci. The collaboration will be effected through a marriage of Absci’s Integrated Drug Creation™ platform and AstraZeneca’s proven expertise in oncology.
It is understood that the agreement includes an upfront payment added to generous R & D funding plus future milestone payments in addition to royalties on product sales.
Sean McClain, Absci founder and CEO, said: “AstraZeneca is a leader in developing novel treatments in oncology and we are excited to collaborate with them to design a therapeutic candidate antibody with the potential to improve the lives of cancer patients.
“This agreement advances Absci’s goal of creating a new generation of life-changing and transformative therapeutics using its AI platform.”
Absci’s Integrated Drug Creation™ platform harnesses generative AI and a suite of scalable wet-lab technologies. The platform generates proprietary data by measuring millions of protein2protein interactions.
These data are used to train Absci’s proprietary AI models and, in later iterations, to validate antibodies designed using the de novo AI models.
The platform accelerates drug discovery by completing the cycle of data collection, AI-driven design and wet-lab validation within an estimated six weeks. It aims to optimise multiple drug attributes concurrently and expand the universe of drug targets to include those previously deemed undruggable, such as GPCRs and ion channels.
Puja Sapra, who is Senior Vice-President of Biologics Engineering & Oncology Targeted Delivery for AstraZeneca said: “This collaboration is an exciting opportunity to utilize Absci’s de novo AI antibody creation platform to design a potential new antibody therapy in oncology.”
