I have been following the field of the emerging techbio industry for a few years from a distance during my PhD, and have been a bit keener in my interest about it in the last few months. Realizing I was spending quite some time doing it each day, by actually going through the news coverage and annotating them, I decided to have other folks benefit from my new procrastination habit.

Here is thus the first occurrence of “This Week In TechBio”, a series of short blog posts listing all the news coverage I could find about Techbio, and the use of AI in the biotech and pharma industry in general, with a short summary of each.

This Week in TechBio 2024/01/07

There were rather a lot of cool announcements prior to JPMH24, one thing that particularly striked me is that Isomorphic Labs and MOMA Therapeutics both signed rather large deals with pretty good royalties, while doing little to no clinical work. This bodes very well for the TechBio industry as they will be able to focus on what they are good at (finding good candidates), and let pharma do what they are good at (running trials, regulation, and marketting).

• 2024/01/07 STAT: Insitro announces 3 papers ahead of JPMH24, an H&E foundation model with the associated twitter thread by the last author, one predicting liver fat content from three modalities in UKB, and one on ALS using deep learning and iPSC to better understand its mechanisms.
• 2024/01/07 Endpoints news: cobverage of the Isomorphic labs deal (sadly I’m not subscribed for now, so no access to the content).
• 2024/01/07 Isomorphic Labs: Iso announces a collaboration with both Eli Lilly and Novartis, both deals are kinda crazy because to the best of my knowledge Iso just started their bioinformatics and computational chemistry teams, and mostly have core ML folks; both deals are super likely pre-IND because they seem to neither have a wetlab for the pre-clinical work, nor a clinical team for actual trials. The fact that both deals could be in the two digits for royalties pre-IND is pretty incredible.
  • Eli Lilly deal: \$45m upfront, up to \$1.700m in milestones, and low two digits in royalties, working on “drug discovery”.
  • Novartis deal:: \$37.5m upfront, up to \$1.200m in milestones, and mid-single to low-double in royalties for “small molecules”
• 2024/01/04 HSBC Venture: HSBC Venture releases their analysis for 2023, slides 39-43 provide a rather good analysis of the techbio venture deals cumulating a total of \$4.900m for the year 2023.
• 2024/01/04 BusinessWire: MOMA therapeutics signs a \$66m upfront cash deal with Roche, with \$2.000m in milestones as well as royalties on top. They are doing everything pre-IND and Roche is doing the clinical steps.
• 2024/01/04 BusinessWire: Announcement of Moonwalk Bioscience, doing epigenetic drugs with some AI. Co founded by Feng Zhang and the former CTO of Illumia. It seems to mostly be the folks from GRAIL. Raised \$57m coming out of stealth.
• 2024/01/03 PharmaTimes: Novo Nordisk announces the opening of an AI lab in London’s King crossing, next to Google and the Crick (it’s just next to St Pancras, like 300 meters).
• 2024/01/03 Fierce Biotech: Goldman Sachs \$650m life sciences fund announced, they already gave money to a few companies (including MOMA therapeutics).
• 2024/01/03 BusinessWire: ArteraAI receives reimbursement prices with Medicare for its AI predictive model for prostate cancer (image + patient history → predicting treatment response to different therapies).
• 2024/01/03 Fierce Biotech: Mayo clinic partnership on AI, with aiforia (H&E slide analysis for colorectal cancer reccurrence) and SimBioSys (diagnostic / pathology for breast cancer treatment).
• 2024/01/03 Sifted: Bioptimus announced, spin-off from Owkin doing bio LLMs, with a goal of a \$20m seed.
• 2024/01/02 STAT: With an increase in regulation from the Biden admisnitration, as well as the attention ChatGPT brought to AI, 2024 may prove a crucial year in the regulation of AI in medicine.
• 2024/01/02 Fierce Biotech:: Follow-up of the original Stokes et al., 2020 paper for antibiotics discovery.
• 2024/01/02 Fierce Biotech: new flu antibody which could help in vaccines design.

Honorable mentions from december

There were also a few very interesting announcements in the month of December, but my notetaking was less than stellar them, so here they are bunched up together:

• Inductive, a compnay focusing on ADMET lead optimisation, got out of stealth and also plans on working on pre-IND tasks.
• AstraZeneca signed a \$247m deal with AbSci for an antibody design collaboration (source: Fierce Biotech).
• Sanofi continues its AI shopping spree, with a \$140m deal with Aqemia, focusing on small molecules design (source: Fierce Biotech).
• AbbVie signs a \$30m upfront, and \$325m in milestones, deal with BigHat Biosciences for antibody design (source: AbbVie).
• Atomic AI comes out of stealth with a \$35m series A deal, they will be focused on all things RNA and released their RNA foundation model ATOM-1 at the same time (source: BusinessWire).
• Owkin also inked quite a few deals.

It is rather interesting to see the new word “AI Pact” come up, it seems that many pharma companies want to get their own AI labs (like Recursion when they acquired Valence labs).

I am a bit curious about whether all these newfound AI labs will be able to provide value to their new corporate overlords of if this is signaling / FOMO on the pharma side, time will tell.

I probably missed quite a few announcements, don’t hesitate to DM me @gama_search if you see anything missing or needing corrections.