Exscientia acquires AI precision medicine company Allcyte

Pharmatech Exscientia is to acquire precision medicine company Allcyte to help increase its understanding of patient biology and expand out of artificial cell lines and animal models.

Allcyte has developed a platform that anticipates the effectiveness of cancer treatments by using AI to analyse the activity of drugs in live patient samples at single-cell resolution. Through the acquisition, Exscientia will work to expand Allcyte’s platform and extend it into early discovery, so that AI approaches are applied from target discovery and drug optimisation to patient selection.

It’s hoped that this end-to-end approach will allow discovery projects to be assessed in a biological setting that more accurately reflects the actual patient environment, improving translation from laboratory to clinic.

“Allcyte is able to demonstrate what therapy actually works in the individual patient with the most disease relevant screening platform we have seen,” said Andrew Hopkins, Exscientia’s CEO. “Combining Allcyte’s platform with Exscientia’s technologies can redefine how drugs are developed, enabling integrated discovery and patient selection. Allcyte has assembled an outstanding team in Vienna and integration of the two platforms truly allows us to build our vision of patient-first AI.”

Commenting on the acquisition, Nikolaus Krall, Allcyte CEO added, “We are incredibly excited about the opportunity to immediately apply this technology to a wide range of drug discovery projects at Exscientia. This will also provide our team with the scale to expand our operations much more quickly to help provide important personalised, precision medicines to as many patients as possible.”

Exscientia will pay €50 million in cash and shares for the acquisition. The company has also announced it plans to expand its Vienna site as the hub of its European Union.