Three weeks after signing a deal with one AI-focused biotech, Boehringer Ingelheim is adding another.

The German pharma has announced a partnership with BERG, the data analysis and Bayesian AI company founded over a decade ago by real estate billionaire Carl Berg. Berg will use its computer and wet lab platform to investigate inflammatory diseases, most notably attempting coming up with causes, biomarkers, drug targets and drugs for inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn’s disease.

Artificial intelligence — the cure-all for the pesky process of making a therapeutic, including data mining, drug discovery, optimal drug delivery and addressable patient population — is being employed by yet another biotech: Lantern Pharma.

The company, which uses its AI platform to identify patients that could benefit from its targeted oncology therapies, on Thursday unveiled plans to make its public debut in an up to $29 million IPO.

Seven months after their headline-grabbing Nature Biotechnology study and in the throes of a Covid-19 research effort, Hong Kong-based AI startup Insilico Medicine has nabbed a new Big Pharma partner: Boehringer Ingelheim.

The deal is with Boehringer’s Research Beyond Borders, an initiative devoted to finding and partnering with new technologies, particularly in Asia. It will give the German drugmaker access to a pair of Insilico platforms: their generative AI software that discovers new drug candidates and their “Pandomics” platform that provides a host of biological data for any project. Financial terms were not disclosed.

For many of the AI companies sprouting on the biopharma field, validation — often meaning confirmation of whether the targets and drugs they identified or generated would actually work — won’t come in years, if at all. But for BenchSci, the drug hunting field is their home turf.

To be sure, the Toronto-based startup is doing something very different from the rest of the pack. Rather than staking claims about the results of drug discovery, it’s out to change the process by hunkering down on a specific problem: helping scientists select the right reagents to conduct their preclinical experiments.

The Mayo Clinic is joining hands with a Silicon Valley VC firm to inject $60 million into nference, a Cambridge, MA-based player in the gold rush to capitalize on biopharma’s growing interest — and urge — to accelerate drug discovery and development using the latest machine learning tools.

While nference ostensibly belongs to a generation of software startups that cropped up around 2013, it doesn’t see itself as part of the AI mainstream, founder and CSO Venky Soundararajan tells Endpoints News. That’s why the A in their AI stands for augmented, not artificial.

Brendan Frey set out, when he began the project to pick out a lead program for Deep Genomics, to prove that the artificial intelligence systems his lab has designed can identify new drug targets and find a winning candidate much faster than traditional methods. Now that they have zeroed in on an antisense oligonucleotide exon-skipping therapy for a subtype of Wilson disease — selected out of 2,400 ailments and 120,000 underlying genetic mutations — as their face case, the Toronto-based biotech is ready to delve into new frontiers with their AI tech.

Days after news leaked that BenevolentAI had secured funding at a rate that would halve its $2 billion valuation, the machine learning startup officially announced it raised $90 million from Singapore-based Temasek for a minority stake.

The news deals another blow to embattled fund manager Neil Woodford. BenevolentAI was one of two biotech AI startups, along with Oxford Nanopore, Woodford was reportedly prepping for auction to raise cash for his still frozen Equity Income Fund. Nanopore’s $1.5 billion valuation remains steady, affirmed by fellow investor IP Group.

BenevolentAI is barely clinging to its unicorn status after its latest round of financing from Singapore’s Temasek, which would reportedly halve its $2 billion valuation — and deal another blow to troubled fund manager Neil Woodford.

Temasek will take a minority stake in a deal that values London-based BenevolentAI at $1 billion, the Sunday Times reported. A $115 million financing round last April — dedicated in part to scaling its drug development work — had donned a pre-money valuation of $2 billion.