As it continues to fight for its merger with Grail, an early-detection cancer test company, the sequencing behemoth Illumina is making another push into drug development.

Tuesday morning, Illumina and AstraZeneca announced a partnership for AI drug discovery. Illumina will pitch in two AI tools — PrimateAI, which predicts diseases from mutations using primate data, and SpliceAI, which predicts how pre-mRNA sequences are cut. AstraZeneca brings its own set of AI tools, including JARVIS, which looks at non-coding genes. The initial phase of the collaboration is set to go for six months, after which “the two companies will assess opportunities for a long-term partnership,” Illumina’s chief strategy officer Joydeep Goswami told Endpoints News in an email.

Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription

Unlock this story instantly and join 154,000+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free.

SIGN UP LOG IN

More than two years after Pfizer tied the knot with machine learning firm CytoReason in an AI-focused deal, the two companies have agreed to keep the partnership alive for at least five more years.

CytoReason, a Big Pharma partner in its own right with Sanofi, Merck and Roche as clients, announced the extension on Tuesday, elaborating more on the company’s partnership with the Big Pharma giant that has been ongoing since before Pfizer’s historic Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty.

Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription

Unlock this story instantly and join 154,000+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free.

SIGN UP LOG IN

The Novo Nordisk Foundation, the large Danish charity that owns the pharmaceutical company of the same name, is making a quantum leap.

Making a deep investment into what it believes is the future of life sciences, the foundation is ponying up $200 million to try to develop the world’s first quantum computer designed to develop new drugs. Novo issued the money in the form of a grant to launch the “Novo Nordisk Foundation Quantum Computing Programme” in tandem with the University of Copenhagen.

Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription

Unlock this story instantly and join 154,000+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free.

SIGN UP LOG IN

Sanofi made clear its AI ambitions were real at the beginning of this year when the Big Pharma took its drug discovery collaboration with Exscientia to the next level, inking a pact that could birth 15 drugs and deliver $5.3 billion to the UK partner.

Seven months later, the AI blueprint is far from over at the French Big Pharma, as another of the much-hyped drug discovery startups is coming to the table in a five-drug deal. Sanofi will pay Atomwise $20 million to kick off the hunt for up to five targets, which are aimed at leading to the creation of new small molecules. Another $1 billion is on the line — as are royalties — and the companies kept mum on the specific diseases or broader therapeutic areas of interest.

Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription

Unlock this story instantly and join 154,000+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free.

SIGN UP LOG IN

When AlphaFold first came out, it debuted with the promise of increasing the number of protein structures that could be predicted, a move that had eluded researchers for decades and could prove to become a crucial step to moving drug development to a new height.

Now, AlphaFold says its database of protein structures has been massively expanded.

Google’s AI outfit and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) announced Thursday that DeepMind’s AlphaFold database now contains the structures of more than 200 million proteins. It’s a substantial jump from where it was a year ago when DeepMind announced that it had predicted the structure of only about 350,000 proteins.

Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription

Unlock this story instantly and join 154,000+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free.

SIGN UP LOG IN

ALS is a debilitating, universally fatal disease. As motor neurons die, patients lose their abilities to walk, cut their own food, swallow and eventually, breathe. Most patients die within three to five years of symptom onset, and there are few approved treatments that only modestly impact function and survival.

Though patients and advocates have rallied around an experimental drug from Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, currently being reviewed by the FDA, they continue to emphasize how more work needs to be done. Research into ALS pathology remains scant relative to other fields, as scientists have yet to discover a confirmed biomarker that measures patients’ progress and have only identified a handful of genetic targets implicated in the disease.

Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription

Unlock this story instantly and join 154,000+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free.

SIGN UP LOG IN