Sanofi and Exscientia have announced a research collaboration and license agreement to develop up to 15 novel small molecule candidates across oncology and immunology, leveraging Exscientia’s end-to-end AI-driven platform utilising actual patient samples.
Background
The companies have been working together since 2016 and in 2019, Sanofi in-licensed Exscientia’s novel bispecific small molecule candidate capable of targeting two distinct targets in inflammation and immunology.
The platform
Exscientia and Sanofi will collaborate to identify and select target projects, leveraging Exscientia’s personalised medicine platform. The platform enables a “patient-first” approach through integrating primary human tissue samples into early target and drug discovery research.
Exscientia scientists can integrate patient, disease, and clinically relevant data into decisions on potential new medicine candidates earlier in the drug creation process. In addition to target discovery, Exscientia will lead small molecule drug design and lead optimisation activities up to development candidate nomination, with Sanofi assuming responsibility for preclinical and clinical development, manufacturing and commercialisation.
Official comments
Frank Nestle, Global Head of Research and Chief Scientific Officer of Sanofi, said: “Sanofi’s collaboration with Exscientia aims to transform how we discover and develop new small molecule medicines for cancer and immune-mediated diseases. Application of sophisticated AI and machine learning methods will not only shorten drug discovery timelines, but will also help to design higher quality and better targeted medicines for patients.”
Andrew Hopkins, DPhil, CEO and founder of Exscientia, said: “Our AI-driven platform can be leveraged across drug discovery, translational research and development, with applications ranging from improving the precision medicine and quality of drug candidates to enriching for patient selection in clinical trials. Our expanded collaboration with Sanofi will utilise the breadth of our platform to test AI-designed drug candidates against patient tissue models, potentially providing far better accuracy than conventional approaches such as mouse models. When you consider the change this represents – testing candidates against actual human tissue years before a clinical trial – it’s transformative.”