AstraZeneca has entered into a strategic drug discovery collaboration and licensing agreement with insitro to use artificial intelligence to identify new drug targets and develop potential treatments for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis and cardiomyopathies.
Under the agreement, insitro will receive an upfront payment of $40 million and is eligible for up to approximately $1.46 billion in potential development and commercial milestone payments. The company could also receive single-digit royalties on global commercial sales of resulting medicines.
AstraZeneca will receive exclusive worldwide rights to advance selected programs identified through the collaboration.
The partnership will use insitro’s Virtual Human AI platform to identify causal disease biology across MASH and cardiomyopathies and advance AstraZeneca-nominated targets from discovery through development candidate selection.
Virtual Human combines large-scale human and cellular datasets with AI-based target identification and medicine design. The platform is intended to help researchers identify the underlying biological and genetic drivers of complex diseases and generate insights that can guide development of new therapeutic candidates.
AstraZeneca will contribute its clinical development, drug development, and regulatory capabilities to advance potential medicines identified through the collaboration. The companies are focusing on MASH and cardiomyopathies because both are complex, heterogeneous diseases with significant unmet medical needs.
For AstraZeneca, the agreement represents another step toward incorporating advanced AI systems into drug discovery, particularly during target selection. The company believes improved understanding of causal disease biology could help researchers identify higher-quality targets earlier and potentially accelerate development.
For insitro, the collaboration expands the application of its AI-driven drug discovery platform while pairing its computational and biological capabilities with AstraZeneca’s pharmaceutical development infrastructure and global scale.
KEY QUOTES:
“We know that disease biology is incredibly complex, and one of the most critical decisions in R&D is selecting the right target. This strategic collaboration underscores our commitment to maximising the potential of cutting-edge AI to tackle the root cause of disease. Partnering with insitro, we will use advanced AI to identify the biological drivers of disease to support the rapid discovery of high-quality novel targets, advancing our ambition to deliver the next generation of medicines to patients faster.”
Sharon Barr, Executive Vice President And Head Of BioPharmaceuticals R&D At AstraZeneca
“MASH and cardiomyopathies are prevalent, underdiagnosed diseases where high-content data holds immense signal for uncovering disease drivers. By applying AI to these complex datasets, we can unlock greater discovery power and reveal novel genetic insights. Our platform simultaneously deconvolutes disease biology and identifies causal drivers of disease pathologies. Partnering with AstraZeneca allows us to pair our deep biological precision with their deep pharmaceutical expertise and scale with potential accelerated advancement of novel programmes through development and to patients.”
Daphne Koller, Founder And CEO Of insitro
