Bristol Myers Squibb cooperated with Exscientia to develop immunomodulatory candidate drugs using AI

Recently, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) announced the application of an immunomodulatory candidate drug developed by exscientia.
Exscientia, an AI driven pharmaceutical technology company, has designed three drugs in phase I human clinical trials. At present, exscientia has offices in Oxford, Miami, Vienna and Osaka. On April 27, exscientia announced that it had completed the round D financing of US $225 million led by Softbank vision fund. In addition, Softbank vision fund also provided another US $300 million investment commitment, and exscientia decided whether to inject capital at its own discretion.
It is understood that exscientia has two cooperation with Bristol Myers Squibb, focusing on multiple treatment fields, including oncology and immunology. In May this year, the two sides reached a cooperation agreement with a potential value of more than $1.2 billion.
The licensed candidate drug targets a key immune kinase. Due to the need to combine selectivity and overall drug characteristics, it has been proved that this immune kinase is difficult to target.
In order to design new drug candidates that can overcome these problems, exscientia uses its end-to-end platform to promote the discovery process, including artificial intelligence driven design, structural biology, chemistry, pharmacology and later preclinical research.
Exscientia’s precision design approach focuses on simultaneously addressing parameters important to the overall therapeutic performance of the target, such as efficacy, selectivity, safety and physicochemical properties. Its AI platform is suitable for solving multi-objective design problems, so as to find new drug candidates with excellent characteristics efficiently and quickly.
Andrew Hopkins, CEO of exscientia, commented: “we focus on designing accurate engineering drugs for challenging drug product characteristics with ‘patient first’ AI technology, and the efficiency of our platform is very high. This candidate drug molecule is the 150th new compound designed and tested, which was identified within 11 months after we started drug design. Through cooperation with Bristol Myers Squibb, coupled with its world-class clinical research and commercialization capabilities, we look forward to advancing the candidate drug to the next stage of development. “
Rupert Vessey, a research and development president of Bristol Myers Squibb, said: “we are pleased to obtain the license of the first candidate drug for strategic cooperation with exscientia. AI learning will continue to play an important role in drug discovery, and exscientia has provided a promising development direction in the field of immunology. We look forward to working together to further promote this candidate drug and bring more benefits to patients. “
It is understood that Bristol Myers Squibb will be responsible for the clinical and commercial development of candidate drugs. Under the terms of the agreement, exscientia will receive an option exercise fee of US $20 million, including the possibility of achieving additional development milestones and royalties for the net sales of any commercial products.