More than six months af­ter se­cur­ing a nine-fig­ure deal with Sanofi for tar­get dis­cov­ery, a French AI re­search group has land­ed its next Big Phar­ma part­ner­ship.

Owkin, un­der the lead­er­ship of CEO Thomas Clozel, an­nounced Wednes­day morn­ing that it’s signed on with Bris­tol My­ers Squibb to op­ti­mize the Big Phar­ma’s clin­i­cal tri­als and im­prove the odds of clin­i­cal suc­cess, ini­tial­ly in car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease. The an­nounce­ment comes af­ter a deal Owkin made with Sanofi last No­vem­ber that build on the pair’s pre­vi­ous dis­cov­ery col­lab­o­ra­tion.

In Wednes­day’s deal, Owkin gets $80 mil­lion in a com­bined up­front and eq­ui­ty pay­ment and po­ten­tial­ly fur­ther pay­ments high­er than $100 mil­lion as clin­i­cal tri­als move in­to lat­er stages. The biotech added in a state­ment that it plans to use the funds to sup­port its da­ta gen­er­a­tion strat­e­gy in mul­ti­ple ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas, pri­mar­i­ly fo­cus­ing on sin­gle-cell omics.

The new col­lab­o­ra­tion dif­fers from the Sanofi deal. In­stead of us­ing its AI plat­form to im­prove tar­get dis­cov­ery ef­forts and seek bet­ter drug com­bi­na­tions, Owkin is pure­ly fo­cused on clin­i­cal tri­al de­sign and op­ti­miza­tion.

Clozel said the com­pa­ny is fo­cus­ing on re­fin­ing the end­points in tri­als, find­ing the right peo­ple and re­duc­ing tri­al “noise.” And as part of its work, there are a few things he wants to keep in mind.

First is find­ing the right sub­groups and defin­ing them with bio­mark­ers. The sec­ond step, ac­cord­ing to the CEO, is to try and in­tro­duce “syn­thet­ic con­trol arms,” which he de­scribed as more ef­fi­cient ways to op­ti­mize a study’s con­trol arm.

“What we do is try to build a more fed­er­at­ed ac­cess to da­ta world­wide, and re­al­ly bring a new way to match pa­tients with mul­ti­ple modal­i­ties, not on­ly in clin­i­cal tri­als, but to im­prove the way you build for the con­trol arms. That’s the sec­ond one,” Clozel said.

The CEO then went on to talk about how im­prov­ing the con­trol arms can help cut costs with­in clin­i­cal tri­als, af­ford­ing the pa­tients in­volved the op­por­tu­ni­ty to take a treat­ment.

Es­sen­tial­ly, fed­er­at­ed learn­ing works by up­load­ing cer­tain pre­dic­tion mod­els to these servers where da­ta are kept — in this case, pa­tient da­ta — and bring­ing the al­go­rithms back to a cen­tral lo­ca­tion, Clozel said. The mod­els are fine-tuned as need­ed, and then Owkin up­loads the new and im­proved pre­dic­tion mod­els back to the servers. This process re­peats over and over, and the da­ta re­main “locked,” stay­ing in one place.

And with this plat­form, it would work to iden­ti­fy bet­ter end­point de­f­i­n­i­tions, op­ti­mize and iden­ti­fy pa­tient sub­groups with dis­tinct bio­mark­ers, and work on es­ti­mat­ing drug can­di­date ef­fi­ca­cy.

“What we’re try­ing to do is re­al­ly bring­ing the plat­form to help with the things that we think can be op­ti­mized,” Clozel told End­points News.

The third thing that Owkin hopes to ac­com­plish is to di­min­ish the ac­tu­al rigid­i­ty of clin­i­cal tri­als, or the “noise,” us­ing a sys­tem called AI-en­abled co­vari­ate ad­just­ments. Clozel said it can al­low for more ef­fi­cient tri­als and im­prove the p-val­ue.

Wednes­day’s deal fol­lows three years of col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween Owkin and Bris­tol My­ers, ac­cord­ing to Clozel, in­clud­ing a num­ber of projects to iden­ti­fy bio­mark­ers and im­prove clin­i­cal tri­al out­comes us­ing re­al-world da­ta.

Venkat Sethu­ra­man

Bris­tol My­ers SVP of glob­al bio­met­rics and da­ta sci­ences Venkat Sethu­ra­man said in a state­ment that “We look for­ward to col­lab­o­rat­ing with Owkin to ex­tend our ap­pli­ca­tions of AI and ma­chine learn­ing to en­hance our dis­cov­ery and de­vel­op­ment pro­grams with high-qual­i­ty, di­verse da­ta from clin­i­cal and re­al world sources.”

In its ear­li­er pact with Sanofi, the Big Phar­ma gave Owkin $90 mil­lion just for ex­clu­siv­i­ty for the first three years of the deal, plus $180 mil­lion in an eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment and more on the line in mile­stone pay­ments. That deal was fo­cused on four on­col­o­gy tar­gets: NSCLC, triple neg­a­tive breast can­cer, mesothe­lioma and mul­ti­ple myelo­ma, Owkin told End­points at the time.

Pfizer has inked a deal to develop a new Covid therapy with Clear Creek Bio — a 10-person biotech out of RA Capital with an office in Cambridge, MA, but one that operates fully remotely.

Paxlovid has become a big moneymaker for Pfizer this year, projecting $22 billion in sales on the year. But the Big Pharma has begun its search for a next-generation Covid antiviral and potential combination therapies as supply of Paxlovid greatly eclipses actual use of the antiviral.

More and more women are driving innovation and taking leadership roles in biotech – as evidenced today in the release of Endpoints News’ list of the top 20 women in the R&D world – but those gains are beginning to extend across pharma sectors.

In pharma manufacturing in the US today, around 46% of all roles are occupied by women, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2021. And according to a Bloomberg report, women’s roles across manufacturing roles had a massive boost after the start of the pandemic.