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.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

David Livingston, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Med scientist who helped shine a light on some of the key molecular drivers of breast and ovarian cancer, died unexpectedly last Sunday.

One of the senior leaders at Dana-Farber during his nearly half century of work there, Livingston was credited with shedding light on the genes that regulate cell growth, with insights into inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that helped lay the scientific foundation for targeted therapies and earlier detection that have transformed the field.

It’s been a busy fall on Wall Street — and this week, we’ve got another biotech going public after Ventyx yesterday.

Massachusetts solid-tumor biotech Xilio Therapeutics made its public debut today, joining 149 other biotechs that have gone public so far this year.

Back on October 1st, Xilio filed its S-1 with the SEC to make its IPO debut for $100 million — the next step in financing after completing a $95 million Series C back in February.