What do Mer­ck, Pfiz­er, As­traZeneca and Te­va have in com­mon with Ama­zon? As of Wednes­day, they’re all join­ing forces with the Is­rael Biotech Fund to launch a new in­cu­ba­tor for star­tups walk­ing the line be­tween AI and drug de­vel­op­ment — and they’re gear­ing up to make some big in­vest­ments.

AION Labs plans to seed be­tween four and six new biotech com­pa­nies per year, start­ing in ear­ly 2022, CEO Mati Gill told End­points News. The funds should sup­port two to four years of run­way for each start­up.

“We have com­peti­tors that are work­ing to­geth­er…be­cause the chal­lenge of har­ness­ing AI and com­pu­ta­tion­al ca­pa­bil­i­ties for phar­ma is so im­mense and it re­al­ly hasn’t been tapped in­to,” Gill said in an in­ter­view.

AION’s roots trace back to Te­va where Gill was most re­cent­ly a se­nior ex­ec­u­tive in charge of out­reach. The phar­ma com­pa­ny was ini­tial­ly look­ing to strength­en its ties with Is­rael’s ro­bust tech com­mu­ni­ty when it came up with the idea for the col­lab­o­ra­tion. Then in De­cem­ber, they won more than $9 mil­lion in an Is­raeli gov­ern­ment ten­der to get start­ed.

How will it work? AION is copy­ing its mod­el from Bio­Med X, a part­ner and bio­med­ical in­cu­ba­tor based in Hei­del­berg, Ger­many. Each year, AION’s phar­ma part­ners will se­lect at least four of the biggest chal­lenges faced by drug­mak­ers in the AI space and is­sue calls for so­lu­tions. Five to 10 fi­nal­ists will be of­fered a chance to spend a week in Is­rael at a boot­camp, where they’ll de­vel­op their pro­pos­als. In the end, the win­ners will be of­fered seed fund­ing to form a com­pa­ny around their ideas.

Jim Weather­all

Gill ex­pects to an­nounce the first round of ap­pli­ca­tions lat­er this month.

“Da­ta, an­a­lyt­ics and AI are al­ready start­ing to trans­form the way we dis­cov­er and de­vel­op new med­i­cines and I be­lieve we are on­ly at the tip of the ice­berg in terms of its promise,” Jim Weather­all, As­traZeneca’s VP of da­ta sci­ence and AI R&D, said in a state­ment.

This isn’t the first in­stance of Big Phar­ma dip­ping its toes in the AI space. Back in May, Bris­tol My­ers Squibb ex­pand­ed a Cel­gene-era deal with AI out­fit Ex­sci­en­tia. And be­fore that, back in Feb­ru­ary, As­traZeneca said it added the first tar­get gen­er­at­ed by AI to its port­fo­lio, com­ing out of a col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Lon­don-based com­pa­ny, Benev­o­len­tAI.

Sev­er­al oth­er biotechs have cropped up with big promis­es to speed up the drug de­vel­op­ment process us­ing ma­chine learn­ing and oth­er AI-fo­cused mod­els, in­clud­ing In­sil­i­co, Deep Ge­nomics, Re­cur­sion, XtalPi and oth­ers.

A lack of diversity in clinical trials has persisted despite decades of initiatives to try to turn the tide.

In a recent review of 17 years of clinical trials, drugmaker GSK found that there were some mismatches between the demographics of its US-based trials and how prevalent diseases were in those populations.

The results, the company says, will help GSK and others design studies that better represent epidemiological rates within races and ethnicities.

Following a promise last year to go “big and fast in breast cancer,” Gilead has secured a win for Trodelvy in the most common form.

The drug was approved to treat HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer patients who’ve already received endocrine-based therapy and at least two other systemic therapies for metastatic cancer, Gilead announced on Friday.

Trodelvy won its first indication in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer back in 2020, and has since added urothelial cancer to the list. HR-positive HER2-negative breast cancer accounts for roughly 70% of new breast cancer cases worldwide per year, according to senior VP of oncology clinical development Bill Grossman, and many patients develop resistance to endocrine-based therapies or worsen on chemotherapy.