US-based biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences has partnered with Genesis Therapeutics to discover and develop novel, small-molecule therapies across multiple targets.
Under the partnership agreement, Genesis will receive an upfront cash payment of $35m across three targets and preclinical, development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments.
It is also eligible to receive tiered royalties on net sales, contingent on Gilead successfully commercialising products emerging from the collaboration.
Gilead can nominate additional targets at predetermined per-target costs.
Gilead Sciences research executive vice president Flavius Martin said: “The use of generative AI in drug development, enabled by people, science and other new technology, has shown potential to accelerate the discovery of molecules for challenging targets.
“We look forward to working with Genesis to apply their AI platform to discover and advance novel therapies that may address significant unmet patient needs.”
Genesis is a biotechnology company leveraging GEMS (Genesis Exploration of Molecular Space), its generative and predictive AI platform, for small molecule drug discovery.
GEMS integrates in-house AI methods, including language models, diffusion models and physical ML simulations, to generate and optimise molecules for complex targets.
Under the collaboration, Genesis will deploy its GEMS platform to develop and optimise small-molecule therapeutics for targets selected by Gilead.
The two companies will jointly work on preclinical research, and Gilead will have exclusive rights for potential clinical development and commercialisation of the products.
Genesis said it has raised more than $300m from top life science, tech, and AI-focused investors, and is building a therapeutic pipeline for various high-impact targets.
Genesis founder and CEO Evan Feinberg said: “Many promising protein targets have a paucity of relevant training data, which makes it difficult to apply off-the-shelf machine learning methods.
“We have designed our physical AI platform to address this issue and enable drug discovery campaigns for difficult targets.
“Genesis is thrilled to combine our expertise in generative AI and drug discovery with Gilead’s deeply experienced research and development teams, with the shared goal of creating breakthrough therapies for patients.”
