阿斯利康与私营 AI 制药公司 Insitro 达成最高 18.6 亿美元药物发现合作，首付仅 4,000 万美元

AstraZeneca Plc is collaborating with machine learning biotech Insitro Inc. in a deal worth as much as $1.86 billion intended to help the British drugmaker find new medicines for the liver and heart.

Astra will make an upfront payment of $40 million, it said Thursday. Insitro will use its own data as well as Astra’s to help better understand the causes of a fatty liver condition and diseases of the heart muscle. If the approach delivers, the biotech could get additional payments worth as much as $1.46 billion as well as potential sales royalties.

The deal marks the latest pharma industry bet that AI can help swiftly discover new drug targets. Insitro has previously announced discovery deals with Eli Lilly & Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. The California techbio company counts Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock and Temasek among its investors.

Insitro uses its AI platform to search both clinical data and models of disease. It aims to reach a new understanding of the causes underlying medical conditions to raise the chance of therapeutic success.

“Choosing our new targets is one of the hardest things that we do,” Sharon Barr, Astra’s executive vice president and head of biopharmaceuticals R&D, said in an interview. “This is a chance for us to really dig into those complex diseases and offer more precision in terms of understanding the biology.”

Astra already has several heart medicines and a pipeline of experimental drugs targeting metabolic ailments. Still, it has experienced recent failures in this area, with a treatment called Wainua not showing efficacy for a disease of the heart muscle earlier this year. Last year, it halted the development of a drug in mid-stage trials being tested for the fatty liver condition known by its acronym MASH.

Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot is looking to expand in the heart and metabolism field and eventually be able to combine some of these medicines.

Insitro says what sets it apart is trying to understand the biology of a disease. “The vast majority of AI drug-discovery companies focus on what happened after a target has been identified,” Daphne Koller, the company’s CEO, said in an interview.

Instead, Insitro looks at the earlier process. “The thing that we lack the most in this industry is a deep understanding of the biology of disease and where to intervene in order to shift and really move the needle,” she said.

With the Astra deal, Insitro is already well advanced in its work on MASH and is hopeful that drug targets will emerge quickly. The cardiovascular research will likely take a little longer, according to Koller.