Robert Bradway, Amgen president and CEO (Getty)
Amgen is approaching the new year the same way it tackled 2021: swinging deals. But now it’s aiming to bring AI capabilities into the fold.
The big biopharma is partnering with Flagship’s Generate Biosciences on five therapeutic programs, the companies announced Thursday morning, in a collaboration that seeks to pair Generate’s machine learning algorithms with Amgen’s drug development capabilities. Amgen will pay $50 million upfront and up to $370 million in milestones for each program, which could total $1.9 billion when all is said and done.
Ray Deshaies, Amgen senior VP of global research, told Endpoints News the focus will be broad, falling under Amgen’s three main research areas: inflammation, oncology and cardiometabolic. He also highlighted how Amgen’s recent acquisition of Teneobio fits well with Thursday’s deal.
‘Teneo gave us the technological platforms, if you will, for making binding domains that are as small, biophysically well behaved and high affinity as possible,’ Deshaies said. The combination ‘enable us to take those raw resources … and rapidly drive them to multispecific molecules that really have the properties that we see, and to get there as rapidly and efficiently as possible.’
AI has drummed up significant hype among life sciences investors and large drug companies in recent years, with improved speed and efficiency being the key motivators. Deshaies said Amgen is recognizing how machine learning can reduce R&D costs in tandem with improved automation, potentially leading to de novo molecule development and doing away with animal models altogether.
Though that goal is more long-term, the Generate deal marks one of Amgen’s most significant steps toward reaching it to date. The biopharma had previously teamed up with BenchSci, a small F-Prime-backed software startup selling antibody and reagent selection services to Big Pharma clients and academic institutions, but Thursday’s deal marks a more significant ‘Generate fits in as just part of that pipeline of building the optimal molecule, and then figuring out the optimal ways to advance that molecule to test that molecule to get the most definitive results,’ Deshaies said. ‘You’re using the best assay system and model systems to evaluate them. So less failures, you can move faster, there’s less trial and error.’
For Generate, the partnership comes on the heels of its massive $370 million Series B closed last November. CEO Mike Nally told Endpoints that Generate’s specific focus on protein design led the company to view Amgen as an ideal partner.
Nally acknowledged the biotech’s summarily quick rise, from debuting in late 2020 to last year’s big round and now its first major partnership. But Generate remains focused on building its own portfolio as well, and as it pushes forward, Nally said the biotech is looking to ‘strike the right balance’ between collaborations and its own pipeline growth.
‘What was really important for us in the Amgen deal was that it was a multi-target collaboration, so that we build the familiarities of ways of working with them,’ Nally said. ‘They’ve been extraordinary partners to date, and bring a level of expertise to complement our areas of expertise. But I think over time, we’ll see this continued balance between our own internal development efforts, as well as fueling the efforts of others.’
There’s no timeline yet on the programs involved in Thursday’s deal. But if recent history is any indication, Amgen might prefer to move quickly. In addition to the Teneobio buyout last year, the biopharma stayed busy with acquisitions of Five Prime and Rodeo as well.
Their Staying Power Lies in their Patient-Centricity
Decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) were traditionally utilized in an isolated fashion prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. To continue their research within the constraints of the pandemic, sponsors and clinical investigators pivoted to a decentralized model out of necessity. At the onset, regulatory agencies offered some guidance on the digital approaches that are acceptable to ensure DCT approaches are applied in a way that maintains patient safety, as well as data quality and integrity.
Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, has become one of Silicon Valley’s biggest advocates for new forms of funding and conducting science (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED)
It’s big days for biology.
The pandemic has seen a series of very public scientific breakthroughs: mRNA vaccine, Covid antibodies, CRISPR as therapy. The minds behind these advancements have graced magazine covers and received prestigious awards.
But the last two years have also, far more quietly, seen a series of new experiments in how to fund the next generation of scientific breakthroughs.
Since March 2020, investors, academics, a significant number of Silicon Valley types, at least one Russian billionaire and two crypto billionaires and, most recently, a few West Coast universities have launched a series of grant programs, institutes, NGOs and companies hoping to change how life science research is done. Though unaffiliated and varying greatly in both size and form, they have broadly promised to evade bureaucracy and misaligned incentives and advance both basic and not-so-basic research in ways they say can’t be done in either conventional academia or profit-focused biotech.
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Eli Lilly is beefing up its fleet of vehicles being deployed to carry drugs to the brain.
Enlisting Canada’s Entos Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly has grabbed rights to a suite of proteo-lipid vehicles (PLVs) as part of a research collaboration that spans multiple programs focused on diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system. Entos will receive an upfront of $50 million, part of it as an equity investment, to start developing PLVs for Lilly’s selection.
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Chris Perkin, Altasciences via Youtube
Altasciences CEO Chris Perkin has gone through several acquisitions in his 45-year career. And if there’s one thing he learned, it’s how not to go through an acquisition.
His company put that knowledge to use on Tuesday when it announced that it had acquired competitor Sinclair research, a preclinical contract research organization in Missouri. With the pickup, Altasciences gains 80 animal rooms, and full-service IND and NDA-enabling toxicology and safety pharmacology services.
Around the same time serial entrepreneur Gary Glick was putting together his latest (and biggest yet) venture, Odyssey Therapeutics this past March, a mentee introduced him to a young London-based company working on applying machine learning to drug discovery.
Rahko, founded just three years ago by a few machine learning experts, was developing a platform right up Glick’s alley: Odyssey, as he’s conceived it, would execute on drug discovery at top speed just like IFM and Scorpion, his previous startups, but do it with a heavy dose of data science.
For anyone who’s been following how the US government has been allocating and shipping supplies of its Covid-19 treatments over the past year, the news has shifted so many times that it can be difficult to keep track of what’s still being shipped and where.
More change is coming this week too, as HHS has now decided to re-start shipments of both Eli Lilly (bamlanivimab plus etesevimab) and Regeneron (casirivimab plus imdevimab) monoclonal antibody products after a short pause because neither product works against the new variant Omicron. Lilly’s combo also was halted last June due to the presence of other variants.
Kicking off 2022, hundreds of pharmaceuticals, including some blockbusters, saw their list prices rise by about 5% on average. But overall, net drug prices (cost after rebates) declined for the fourth year in a row, potentially complicating already stalled drug price reform efforts.
Among the drugs seeing new increases as of Jan. 1 are Gilead’s bevy of blockbuster HIV drugs.
Biktarvy, which pulled in more than $7 billion in worldwide sales in 2020, saw a 4.8% price increase in 2021, and now, another 5.6% increase in 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit 46brooklyn Research.
John Maraganore (Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On his way out of Alnylam, outgoing CEO John Maraganore, who had led the biotech through thick and thin for 19 years, said late last year he wanted to advise new biotech companies in the grandfather phase of his career.
‘It’s like a grandfather, right? You get the benefit of loving your grandchildren, but not having to take care of them all the time,’ Maraganore said at the time. ‘I want to be a granddad.’
Roger Perlmutter, Eikon CEO
Roger Perlmutter hasn’t wasted any time since announcing his supposed retirement from Merck in October 2020. After leaving his perch as one of the most successful R&D chiefs in Big Pharma, he’s now snatching a cool half-billion dollars to develop ‘a battery of innovative tools’ for drug discovery at the young startup Eikon Therapeutics.
Eikon closed on a $517.8 million Series B round on Thursday morning, bringing the Hayward, CA-based company’s total raise to more than $668 million.
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https://endpts.com/amgen-partners-with-flagships-machine-learning-startup-promising-up-to-1-9b-as-big-pharma-ups-bet-on-ai/
