AI drug discovery company Owkin has signed a pact with French drugmaker Servier to license Owkin’s AI scientist K Pro across Servier’s oncology discovery and trial operations.
Owkin will make its multimodal patient data accessible to Servier’s research teams for analysis, according to a release.
The deal builds on a 2023 agreement between the two organizations to use AI to identify patient populations that could benefit from Servier’s therapies and analyze disease biology to accelerate the development of targeted therapies.
The recently inked collaboration aims to allow Servier to access multimodal patient data from Owkin’s MOSAIC network, which brings together patient samples and technologies from stakeholders across the drug development market to create an interactive digital map showing the molecular makeup of a tissue and the exact physical locations within it.
MOSAIC stands for Multi-Omics Spatial Atlas in Cancer. Preserving the architecture of tissue from patient samples and integrating it with other modalities like imaging and genomics allows researchers to gain new insights into cancer.
Owkin’s AI platform K Pro will analyze the shared data to deliver insights to Servier about molecule optimization, target discovery, biomarker identification, subgroup optimization and clinical design.
“Our AI scientist is changing the way biopharma works,” said Thomas Clozel, M.D., CEO and co-founder of Owkin, in a release. “By pairing K Pro with Owkin’s multimodal patient data, Servier’s scientists can investigate the biology of hard-to-treat cancers and reach answers that manual analysis alone cannot deliver.”
Owkin has racked up several Big Pharma partnerships in recent years, including a licensing deal with AstraZeneca in May for K Pro, a cancer testing agreement with Merck & Co. in 2023 and a $270 million clinical research platform pact with Sanofi in 2021.
Servier, too, is no stranger to signing AI deals to make its operations more efficient. It penned an $888 million cancer R&D pact with Hong Kong biotech Insilico Medicine in January and extended its AI drug R&D deal with Google Cloud last year.
Servier Executive Vice President of R&D Claude Bertrand said he looks forward to deploying K Pro across its oncology research. “At Servier, we are constantly looking for new ways to deepen our understanding of disease biology and to bring better treatments to patients with hard-to-treat cancers," he said in a release. "Access to high-quality patient data and AI-driven analysis in one place, through K Pro, helps our teams generate and test hypotheses with greater speed and confidence."