Big Pharma Racing into Generative AI

The biggest news this month is the foray of Big Pharma into AI. We will take a closer look at Pharma companies collaborating with Generative AI partners, especially in the area of drug discovery and development. Big Pharma is spending a ton of money on AI-partner companies, who have GenAI platforms across different therapeutic areas. It will be interesting to see what benefits Big Pharma will get from these expenditures. We will have all the future updates for you in The GenAI Biotech Report.

• Merck expands vaccine development collaboration to license Evaxion’s preclinical, AI-designed vaccine candidates. Evaxion will receive an upfront payment of $3.2 million and up to $10 million in 2025. In the future, Evaxion is eligible for potential payments up to $592 million per product.

• Novartis and Generate:Biomedicines announce collaboration to discover and develop protein therapeutics with Generative AI. Generate will receive a total upfront payment of $65 million and may receive more than $1 billion in future payments.

• Gilead and Genesis announce collaboration to discover and develop novel, small molecule therapies across multiple targets. This collaboration will deploy Genesis’s AI platform, GEMS to assist in generating and optimizing molecules for targets selected by Gilead. Genesis will receive an upfront cash payment of $35 million across three targets and Gilead.

• Eli Lilly partners with AI startup Genetic Leap, who will be using its RNA-targeted AI platform to generate genetic drug candidates against selected targets for Lilly to develop genetic-based drugs. As part of the deal, Genetic Leap will receive payments of up to $409 million.

1. OpenAI launches model with reasoning capabilities that is designed to spend more time thinking before they respond. They can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems in science, coding, and math. The model is named OpenAI o1 (formerly Strawberry). OpenAI

2. Insilico Medicine to collaborate with Inimmune, which will utilize Chemistry42, Insilico's proprietary generative artificial intelligence technology to accelerate the discovery and development of next-generation immunotherapeutics. Eukeralert

3. Sino Biological and BioGeometry announce collaboration to advance Protein R&D with Generative AI. SinoBiological

4. ZipBio - a biotech startup revolutionizing AI drug discovery with cutting-edge protein design and drug discovery platform - announces official launch. LinkedIn

5. Clarivate announced the release of the Web of Science™ Research Assistant. The new generative AI-powered tool helps researchers find key papers faster, handle complex research tasks and visualize connections. Clarivate

6. Rakovina Therapeutics and Variational AI announce collaboration to leverage Generative AI to identify and develop novel small-molecule therapies against DNA-damage response targets for the treatment of cancer. Rakovina

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