New collaboration leverages Insilico’s end-to-end discovery platform and EQRx’s innovative business model to accelerate drug development.
Insilico Medicine has announced it has entered into a strategic collaboration with EQRx, a drug discovery company committed to developing and delivering innovative medicines to patients at “radically lower prices”.
The collaboration will combine Insilico’s Pharma.AI platform to advance de novo small molecule design and generation with EQRx’s clinical development and commercialisation expertise. EQRx and Insilico will engage in a co-development partnership whereby each party will be eligible for a profit share proportional to its respective level of investment.
Longevity.Technology: Before the rise of machine learning, drug discovery was expensive, time-consuming and had a high attrition rate. As data sets increase and algorithms grow in sophistication, ML is playing a greater role in drug discovery, all the way through the process from target identification to clinical trial evaluation, as well as evaluating drug repurposing candidates. Insilico’s end-to-end AI-driven Pharma.AI platform is dedicated to discovering novel small molecule drug candidates for multiple targets; the new partnership with EQRx takes this discovery to the next level – into clinic. What’s more, the key driver for the collaboration is accessibility, making innovative medicines that are affordable and effective.
Pursuant to the collaboration agreement, the parties will identify and select up to three therapeutics targets leveraging Insilico’s AI-driven platform, Pharma.AI. Insilico will lead the drug discovery from small molecule hit identification through lead optimisation and preclinical candidate nomination to Investigational New Drug (IND) application. EQRx will assume responsibility for driving clinical development, regulatory activities and commercialisation. Insilico has the option to invest in the product candidate(s) at various clinical development stages in return for increased commercialisation profits.
“Both EQRx and Insilico Medicine strive to accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines and make effective therapeutics more accessible and affordable,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine. “This partnership will combine our end-to-end AI-powered drug discovery capabilities with EQRx’s innovative partnership model and expertise in clinical development and patient access to accelerate the discovery and development of innovative therapies [1].”
“We are pleased to partner with Insilico Medicine, a leader in AI-based drug discovery,” said Carlos Garcia-Echeverria, PhD, chief of Rx Creation at EQRx. “This collaboration will further expand our early-stage R&D efforts to fuel potential pipeline growth as we continue to apply the best of today’s innovation in biomedical sciences and digital solutions to discover high-quality, innovative and more affordable medicines [1].”
