Sanofi and Owkin Intensify AI Alliance to Revolutionize Immunology Drug Development

French pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, and AI biotech company, Owkin, have further expanded their initial 2021 oncology alliance to include drug positioning within immunology. The partnership will see Owkin's machine learning expertise used to identify optimal disease indications for Sanofi's drugs targeting autoimmune diseases. The collaboration aims to enhance patient outcomes through the integration of AI and multimodal data analysis in drug development, supporting precision medicine strategies in immunology to accelerate the discovery and development of targeted therapies for complex diseases.

The following article originally appeared in PM Live.

The expansion builds on the strategic alliance between both companies to work on drug discovery and development programmes in oncology.

Along with the strategic collaboration announced in November 2021, Sanofi announced an equity investment of $180m and a total payment of $90m to discover and develop programmes for four types of cancer: non-small cell lung cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, mesothelioma and multiple myeloma, spanning three years.

In the next phase of this collaboration, Owkin will focus on drug positioning within Sanofi’s immunology therapeutic pipeline.

With more than 80 different forms, immunological or autoimmune disease occurs when the immune system mistakingly attacks healthy cells in the organs and tissues.

Despite many being rare, the National Institutes of Health has estimated that autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), rheumatoid arthritis and lupus collectively affect between 5% and 8% of the US population.

Owkin will combine its existing knowledge and machine learning to identify the best disease indications, matching the most effective subpopulations using multimodal data for specific drugs.

The companies aim to help improve patient outcomes through the integration of AI and data into drug development programmes.

Emanuele de Rinaldis, vice president, global head of precision medicine and computational biology, Sanofi, said: “The AI and multimodal data analysis approaches we are collaborating on will help to understand patient heterogeneity and to enable future precision medicine strategies in immunology.

“Our intent is for patients to receive the most effective therapy based on their specific molecular and cellular features driving their disease.”

Thomas Clozel, chief executive officer, Owkin, said: “The new projects within Sanofi’s immunology therapeutic pipeline are further validation of our approach of applying AI to multimodal data to [discover] and [develop] new treatments.”

Most recently, AbbVie and Parvus Therapeutics entered into an exclusive global license collaboration to develop and commercialise novel therapies to treat IBD, combining AbbVie’s immunology expertise with Parvus’ regulatory T cell immune tolerisation platform technology, Navacim.

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