Merck partners Valo on $3bn, AI-based Parkinson's project

Merck KGaA has teamed up with Flagship Pioneering's Valo Health on an ambitious project to apply AI to the discovery of novel drug targets and therapeutics for Parkinson's disease.

The partnership puts the Lexington-based biotech in line for up to $3 billion in upfront and potential milestone payments, as well as R&D funding and royalties on sales if any new medicines reach the market.

Flagship Pioneering launched Valo Health in 2020, highlighting its machine learning, cloud computing, and data-crunching capabilities that promised to "shave years off timelines and improve the likelihood of success by finding previously hidden association drivers of disease and therapeutic molecules."

Since then, Valo's approach to target and drug discovery – which uses real-world data and human preclinical models to explore the causal biology of diseases in the creation of its AI models – has attracted wide-ranging partnerships with Pfizer in autoimmune diseases and Novo Nordisk in the cardiometabolic disease arena.

The agreement with Merck comes just a few weeks after Valo was awarded a grant from the Michael J Fox Foundation (MJFF) to seek out drug­gable bio­log­i­cal tar­gets in Parkinson's, focusing particularly on nucleotide-binding oligomerisation domain con­tain­ing 2 (NOD2), a protein that has been linked to the disease through its role in inflammation.

"Starting with human causal biology in vast amounts of real-world data allows us to unravel the complexity of heterogeneous diseases like Parkinson's and start experimentation with human validated mechanisms," said Brian Alexander, Valo Health's chief executive.

He added that gives "greater confidence that a target will translate into a successful therapeutic candidate."

For Merck, the alliance is the latest part of a drive to revitalise its healthcare business, coming after its $3.9 billion takeover of rare cancer drug developer SpringWorks earlier this year and a licensing deal with Abbisko Therapeutics that added another therapy for a rare tumour.

Merck is facing slowing sales growth for its cancer immunotherapy Bavencio (avelumab) and the looming patent expiry for MS drug Mavenclad (cladribine), which together accounted for around a fifth of its €8.5 billion healthcare sales in 2024.

"Our research engine is focused on delivering meaningful medicines for patients with high unmet medical needs," commented Merck's head of neurology and immunology research, Amy Kao.

"Valo Health's AI-enabled platforms utilising human data will help sharpen target selection and streamline drug discovery, enabling us to advance the most promising candidates faster."

You can watch an interview between pharmaphorum editor-in-chief Jonah Comstock and Brian Alexander at this year's BIO conference, delving into Valo Health's approach to AI in drug discovery, below.