Sanofi partners BioMap on AI hunt for biologic therapies

Sanofi has added another dimension to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to seek out new drugs, partnering with BioMap on a project to find biologic therapies in a deal that could be worth up to $1 billion.

The alliance is getting underway with a $10 million upfront payment and will tap into a “biological map” of proteins that BioMap has built from various private and public data sources, according to Le Song, the AI specialist’s chief technology officer.

The Menlo Park and Beijing-based company was set up by the co-founder and former chief executive of Chinese search engine group Baidu, Robin Li, as well as Baidu Ventures’ former CEO, Wei Liu.

That close relationship means it has access to Baidu’s supercomputer capabilities, as well as receiving funding from the tech giant in a $100 million Series A that was completed in 2021.

Sanofi also has a close relationship with Baidu, as it has been working with the company since 2021 on the application of computational biology and AI algorithms to the design of mRNA-based therapeutics and vaccines with improved stability and activity.

BioMap has generated its map – which it claims is the largest foundational model-based resource within life sciences – with the help of dozens of partnerships with academic groups around the world. Working with Sanofi, it will develop AI models and large language models (LLM) to design and optimise new biologic drugs.

“BioMap’s foundational models are revolutionising AI in biology by enabling one large model, trained on ubiquitous unlabelled data, to inform multiple downstream task models,” said the company.

“This approach enables superior prediction from limited data in a range of therapeutic areas, including immunology, neurology, oncology, and rare diseases.”

Sanofi has made a pledge to deploy AI across its business, part of a larger trend of big pharmas hedging their bets with partnerships with AI firms to find more drug candidates faster.

That ambition has resulted in a series of partnerships, including a six-compound drug discovery deal with Chinese biotech Insilico Medicine worth up to $1.2 billion, and a massive alliance with Exscientia of the UK spanning 15 programmes that could total $5.2 billion.

Others include a five-target collaboration with US start-up Atomwise worth up to $1 billion, and a $270 million partnership with Franco-US company Owkin focused on four types of cancer.

Matt Truppo, Sanofi’s global head of research platforms, said that the new alliance with BioMap “further underscores Sanofi’s commitment to becoming the first pharma company powered by artificial intelligence at scale.”

He added: “By combining Sanofi’s proprietary data sets, digital infrastructure, AI and data science capabilities, and drug development expertise with BioMap’s protein large language models, high-performance computing, and deep understanding of AI, we can optimise the process of discovery and development of breakthrough biotherapeutics.”