Genesis Therapeutics’ shiny AI drug discovery platform GEMS is catching on, having now caught the eye of Gilead Sciences.
In Genesis’ third big pharma collaboration, Gilead has agreed to pay its new partner $35 million up front for AI-based drug discovery work on three undisclosed targets. Further, Gilead “will have an option to nominate additional targets for a predetermined per-target fee,” according to a Sept. 10 press release.
Under the deal, Gilead secures development and commercialization rights to any compounds that arise from a result of the discovery efforts. Genesis would be in line for milestone payments and potential tiered royalties on those prospects.
“Many promising protein targets have a paucity of relevant training data, which makes it difficult to apply off-the-shelf machine learning methods,” Genesis’ founder and CEO Evan Feinberg, Ph.D., explained in the release. “We have designed our physical AI platform to address this issue and enable drug discovery campaigns for difficult targets.”
The California-based biotech is “thrilled” to combine its generative AI and drug discovery expertise with Gilead’s experienced R&D teams, Feinberg added.
Genesis has previously linked up with Genentech and Eli Lilly, with the latter deal carrying a potential total value of $670 million for up to five targets.
Last year, the biotech raked in a series B haul of $200 million from backers Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Management & Research Company, BlackRock, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm NVentures. Existing investors T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Rock Springs Capital, Radical Ventures, and Menlo Ventures also took part in the fundraising round.
The funds were meant to help take the company to the clinical testing stage for its “wholly owned pipeline of AI-enabled programs” while also investing in further development of its generative and predictive AI methods, Genesis said at the time.
As for Gilead’s other efforts on the drug discovery front, the company put in $20 million this year in a partnership with Cartography Biosciences to discover novel tumor-selective target antigens and pairs of antigens.