Israeli company imperviousThe company, which develops artificial intelligence-based tools to improve drug discovery processes, has announced a strategic agreement with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Immunai will receive $18 million from AstraZeneca in the initial phase of research, but the main importance of the deal is not the initial amount, but the fact that a large multi-year link is planned between the Israeli company and the British-Swedish company. The pharmaceutical giant — a link important enough for AstraZeneca to report on itself.
Immunai already has strategic agreements with 30 pharmaceutical companies, most of which involve much smaller sums of money. Immunai signed its first agreement with AstraZeneca in 2022, and is now being expanded on the existing deal.
Immunai has developed a system that models the human body, especially the immune system. He offers to use this model for pharmaceutical companies to improve the efficiency of drug development – to choose between different potential molecules, choose appropriate combinations of drugs to trial, choose doses, and so on. “When we launched, we were saying we were the Google of the immune system,” says Noam Solomon, CEO and co-founder of Immunai. “Today, we say we are ChatGPT for medicines. The researcher can ask the system – if not in text form – different questions about the feasibility of different courses of action. And unlike ChatGPT, the system can also explain to the researcher, and later to the regulator, why a choice was made. specific course.”
Most companies in computational biology are working to improve the drug discovery phase, but that phase represents less than 5% of the cost of drug development, Solomon says. Drug formulation, dosage, planning and execution of clinical trials are less important stages in terms of risk of failure, and trials are the most expensive part of the process. “In drug development, they talk about Erom’s Law, the opposite of Moore’s Law in the semiconductor industry. Drug development doesn’t get more efficient, it actually gets less efficient over time, but the drug discovery phase is not the pain point. We’re dealing with the really pain points for companies.” pharmaceutical”.
Solomon says each project, like the one that is the subject of the agreement with AstraZeneca, improves the system itself. “Today, we invest less in each of our projects; the platform has become more automated. The more data we have, or more precisely, the more clinical samples we generate data from, the more accurate our predictions become.”
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To date, Immunai has raised $300 million, including $215 million in a single investor round in 2021, when the company was valued at more than $1 billion. “Most of the money is still in the bank,” says Solomon. “A large portion of our funding comes from our agreements with pharmaceutical companies. We currently employ 170 people, which is a very successful size for a company like ours that wants to remain innovative. We have not had to downsize due to the crises that the biomedical sector has experienced in the last two years.”
How do you see your future?
“Within two years, we will get to a situation where we will no longer be dependent on fundraising. I am not saying that we are not already dependent on fundraising today, just that we are very ambitious and we would probably want to do another round, to get the system and the company to where we dream of getting to, but We have already refused to invest in certain circumstances.
“We don’t know whether, in the distant future, we will continue the business model of partnering in development with pharmaceutical companies, or whether we will have greater ownership of the final product. Right now, we’re not thinking about that, but about how to do “What we are doing now is the best way possible.”
“AI is transforming cancer drug discovery and clinical development,” said Iker Huerga, Chief Data Scientist at AstraZeneca. “We are very pleased to collaborate with Immunai to leverage their innovative platform to advance our data-driven R&D strategy and gather potential new insights into the mechanisms of action of therapeutics.” “Immune.”
Published by Globes, Israel Business News – en.globes.co.il – on September 26, 2024.
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