Exscientia and GSK announce strategic collaboration

Exscientia and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) have entered into a strategic collaboration to apply an AI-enabled platform in the discovery of novel and selective small molecules for up to 10 disease-related targets.

Under the terms of the agreement, Exscientia will receive payments from GSK to undertake discovery programmes of targets, nominated by GSK, with the goal of delivering pre-clinical candidates. If all objectives are achieved, Exscientia will also receive milestone payments. In total the research and milestone payments from GSK will be £33 million.

“This agreement with GSK is the second we have signed in recent months with a top global pharma company. The alliance provides further validation of our artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform and its potential to accelerate the discovery of novel, high-quality drug candidates,” explained Andrew Hopkins, CEO of Exscientia in a press statement. “Applying our approach to client discovery projects has already delivered candidate-quality molecules in roughly one-quarter of the time, and at one-quarter of the cost of traditional approaches. Our intention, therefore, is to apply these capabilities to projects selected by GSK. Delivering efficiencies to drug discovery has the potential to revolutionise the way early projects are executed, enabling more dynamic target selections from the burgeoning set of opportunities. We look forward to a productive collaboration with GSK.”

“Exscientia has built an excellent team with proven innovation in drug discovery technologies,” added John Baldoni, senior vice president, Platform Science and Technology at GSK. “We anticipate that their industry-leading approach will accelerate the discovery of new molecules against high value GSK targets with speed and confidence.”

As a part of the collaboration, Exscientia is incentivised to reduce the number of compounds required for synthesis and assay to achieve lead and candidate compound goals. The company will use its ‘Big Data’ resources and its AI-driven algorithms to design novel molecules that fulfil the requirements of the lead and candidate criteria.

Exscientia is focused on small-molecule drug discovery using automated drug design.

GSK is a global healthcare company involved in the research, development and manufacture of innovative pharmaceutical medicines, vaccines and consumer healthcare products.