Boehringer signs AI drug discovery deal with Owkin

Boehringer Ingelheim has joined Sanofi and AstraZeneca in signing up to deploy Owkin's AI platform K Pro in its drug discovery operations.

First launched at last year's ESMO cancer congress, K Pro is an agentic 'AI Scientist' that helps scientists and drug developers to analyse diverse medical data – including patient information – using plain language, instead of complex computer code, and explore biological patterns, disease traits, and treatment ideas.

Under the terms of the agreement – financial terms of which have not been disclosed – Boehringer has decided to roll out the AI agent more widely in its oncology and immunology R&D operations after carrying out a pilot assessment last year.

According to Owkin, that pilot – which tapped into the $50 million collaborative MOSAIC (Multi Omic Spatial Atlas In Cancer) dataset – "delivered deep spatial insights into the tumour microenvironment of a gene target."

"This agreement between Owkin and Boehringer Ingelheim shows how cutting-edge AI has the potential to enable data-driven pharmaceutical research," commented Thomas Clozel, Owkin's co-founder and co-chief executive.

"We believe the next decade of drug development will be defined by access to deep multimodal patient data and to AI Scientists – like K Pro – capable of reasoning over that data."

AZ and Sanofi have longstanding working relationships with France and US-based Owkin, and signed up to use the K Pro system earlier this year. AZ took a three-year license to the platform in May, planning to use it to build custom AI agents to assist its R&D teams, while Sanofi entered a similarly focused five-year alliance in June.

Owkin's co-CEO Pascal Weinberger said in a social media post that additional partnerships should be announced with other pharma groups soon.

"The way science (and many other things!) are done is changing completely and dramatically with the advent of superhuman intelligence," he asserted.

"This is the most exciting opportunity of our lifetime to completely re-think the way we discover drugs, bring them to market, and do so many other things. Some companies are going to be able to adjust and be supercharged by this shift, while others will be left behind."

Takeda taps Weave Bio AI for regulatory tasks

Meanwhile, in other AI news this week, Takeda has started working with Weave Bio to use the latter's platform – designed to automate and speed up the massive amount of regulatory paperwork required to get new medicines approved – across 14 of its drug development projects.

The multi-million-dollar licensing deal is the first step in a broader effort at Takeda to modernise how it creates, manages, and uses regulatory content across its portfolio, according to the two companies.

A study of the platform focusing on the Investigational New Drug (IND) phase of drug development showed a 97% reduction in time to first draft within the evaluated use case, from approximately 100 hours to three.