Novo Nordisk swells alliance with AI firm Valo Health

Novo Nordisk has almost doubled the scale of an R&D alliance with Valo Health – a specialist in applying artificial intelligence to drug discovery – adding up to nine programmes to the original 11 covered in their original agreement.

Back in 2023, Novo Nordisk paid $60 million upfront to Valo to harness its real-world human data and human tissue modelling technology in the search for new therapies for cardiometabolic diseases, with the total potential deal value set at $2.7 billion.

Now, the additional programmes come with another $190 million in near-term payments, while the total value of the deal – including milestone payments – has ballooned to around $4.6 billion, not including R&D funding. The expanded agreement covers novel treatments for obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, according to the partners.

Valo Health's Opal platform is claimed to predict some characteristics missing in other AI-based drug discovery systems, such as pharmacokinetics, ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion), toxicity, and the functional effects of compounds. The use of human datasets early in the process is intended to provide a better understanding of target biology.

"We are very pleased with the progress we have made together with Valo during the first year of our collaboration, and we are excited to expand the scope to put a stronger focus on obesity and type 2 diabetes in addition to cardiovascular disease," commented Marcus Schindler, Novo Nordisk's chief scientific officer.

"We believe this partnership will help Novo Nordisk fulfil our ambition to expand the number of new drug programmes we bring to the clinic," he added, pointing to several novel targets identified in the alliance so far with the potential to deliver "differentiated cardiometabolic drug programmes."

The two companies are working on multiple small-molecule drug candidates, all of which remain in preclinical development, and they have said they will "continue working closely together to derive novel insights from human genetic and longitudinal patient data at the intersection of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease."

News of the expanded agreement is a timely boost for Flagship Pioneering-backed Valo Health, which recently shelved the development of its lead in-house drug candidate for diabetic retinopathy after it failed a phase 2 trial. The company has said the ROCK1/2 still has potential, however, and has started to seek a development partner to take it forward.