As­traZeneca is dou­bling down in chron­ic kid­ney dis­ease and id­io­path­ic pul­monary fi­bro­sis by se­lect­ing one tar­get for each of those via its AI-pow­ered part­ner.

Orig­i­nal­ly teamed up in 2019, the Big Phar­ma has now se­lect­ed a to­tal of five tar­gets via its UK coun­ter­part, Benev­o­len­tAI. The tal­ly in­cludes two tar­gets in CKD and three in IPF, a lung-scar­ring and breath­ing-con­stric­tion dis­ease with two ap­proved drugs — Boehringer In­gel­heim’s Ofev and Roche’s Es­bri­et, both giv­en the nod in 2014 — and a re­cent gener­ic en­try.

The two new tar­gets trig­ger two mile­stone pay­ments to the Lon­don-based start­up, Benev­o­len­tAI said Thurs­day morn­ing. As­traZeneca EVP of Bio­Phar­ma R&D, Mene Pan­ga­los, said the new tar­gets are “nov­el rare vari­ants,” in a state­ment.

The news comes nine months af­ter the pair upped the col­lab­o­ra­tion with two more dis­ease ar­eas — heart fail­ure and sys­temic lu­pus ery­the­mato­sus — in a three-year ex­ten­sion to the orig­i­nal tie-up. No­var­tis al­so en­list­ed the help of Benev­o­len­tAI in 2019 to work on clin­i­cal-stage on­col­o­gy as­sets.

Benev­o­len­tAI al­so touts iden­ti­fy­ing Eli Lil­ly and In­cyte’s JAK in­hibitor baric­i­tinib as a treat­ment can­di­date for Covid-19. The atopic der­mati­tis and hair loss drug end­ed up get­ting emer­gency use au­tho­riza­tion and then ap­proval in May of this year for adults with Covid-19 who need sup­ple­men­tal oxy­gen, ven­ti­la­tion or EC­MO.

In-house work is al­so part of Benev­o­len­tAI’s ap­proach, with an in­ter­nal pipeline that com­pris­es a Phase I atopic der­mati­tis as­set and mul­ti­ple pre­clin­i­cal can­di­dates across ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis, ALS and glioblas­toma mul­ti­forme. An an­tivi­ral, on­col­o­gy as­sets, Parkin­son’s dis­ease can­di­dates and NASH hope­fuls sit fur­ther down the pipeline.

A com­pa­ny that went pub­lic via a SPAC, Benev­o­len­tAI is one of many up­starts claim­ing to up­end drug dis­cov­ery via an ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence mod­el that it touts as a start-from-scratch ap­proach as com­pared to its com­peti­tors’ re­verse-en­gi­neer­ing route.

“It’s not a right and wrong sit­u­a­tion … it’s a re­al­ly mul­ti­di­men­sion­al pic­ture of hu­man bi­ol­o­gy across the com­mon­al­i­ties of hu­man dis­ease,” CSO Anne Phe­lan pre­vi­ous­ly told End­points News. “For ex­am­ple, de­pend­ing on the cell type that’s af­fect­ed, the graph could end up con­nect­ing to Alzheimer’s or di­a­betes, where un­der­ly­ing phys­i­ol­o­gy could be re­al­ly quite sim­i­lar.”

The list of AI shops in­cludes Ex­sci­en­tia, Atom­wise, Re­cur­sion Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, in­sitro, XtalPi, Deep Ge­nomics, In­sil­i­co and, among oth­ers, Cy­toRe­a­son, which boost­ed its Pfiz­er part­ner­ship by five years in a Sep­tem­ber deal.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”