Pharmaceutical company GSK has announced a strategic collaboration with the biotech Relation to improve the understanding of disease biology and support the discovery of new therapeutic targets. 

Specifically, the partnership will focus on generating large-scale human cellular perturbation data and deploying them into models, such as Relation’s cellular biology foundational model, MORGAN.  

Under the terms of the agreement, Relation may receive up to $110 million in upfront and success-based milestone payments. 

The companies will work together to create datasets that capture how human cells respond to genetic and pharmacological interventions. It’s hoped that these data will provide new insights into disease biology and support future target discovery efforts. Integrated automation will be used to facilitate the generation of time-resolved perturbation data with multi-omics readouts at significant scale and consistency. The resulting data will then be used to train foundation models.  

“Deepening our understanding of the underlying biology of disease starts with richer data, to be used in models that can give us greater confidence in the discovery of therapeutic targets that can ultimately yield medicines. Through this collaboration with GSK, we will generate novel datasets from physiologically relevant human disease systems that can help reveal important biological mechanisms and support future discovery efforts. We are excited to bring together advanced experimental capabilities and computational approaches to create a valuable resource for understanding disease,” said David Roblin, Chief Executive Officer of Relation.