Israeli company Immunai, a developer of AI-based tools for improving drug discovery processes, has announced a strategic agreement with pharmaceuticals company AstraZeneca. Immunai will receive $18 million from AstraZeneca at the initial stage of the research, but the main significance of the deal is not the initial sum, but the fact that a substantial, multi-year link is planned between the Israeli company and the British-Swedish pharmaceuticals giant - a link important enough for AstraZeneca to report it itself.
Immunai already has strategic agreements with 30 pharmaceuticals companies, most of them involving much smaller financial sums. Immunai signed a first agreement with AstraZeneca in 2022, and it is now being expanded in the current deal.
Immunai has developed a system that is a model of the human body, chiefly of the immune system. It offers use of the model to pharmaceuticals companies to improve the efficiency of drug development - to choose between various possible molecules, to choose the right combinations of drugs for trial, to choose dosages, and so on. "When we set out, we would say that we were the Google of the immune system," says Immunai CEO and co-founder Noam Solomon. "Today, we say that we’re the ChatGPT of drugs. The researcher can ask the system - if not in text form - various questions about the worthwhileness of various courses of action. Unlike ChatGPT, the system can also explain to the researcher, and later to the regulator, why a particular course was chosen."
Solomon says that most companies in computational biology improve the drug discovery stage, but that that stage represents less than 5% of the cost of drug development. Formulation of the drug, dosage, planning and execution of clinical trials, are no less critical stages as far as the risk of failure is concerned, and the trials are the most expensive part of the process. "In drug development, they talk about Eroom’s law, that is, the reverse of Moore’s law in the semiconductor industry. Drug development is not becoming more efficient, but actually less efficient as time passes, but the drug discovery stage is not the pain point. We deal with the points that are really painful for the pharma companies."
Solomon says that every project, such as 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 is becoming more automatic. The more data we have, or more precisely the more clinical samples from which we generate the data, the more accurate our predictions become."
So far, Immunai has raised $300 million, of which $215 million was in a single-investor round in 2021, when the company was valued at over $1 billion. "Most of the money is still in the bank," says Solomon. "A large part of our financing comes from our agreements with the drug companies. We currently employ 170 people, which is a very successful size for a company like ours that wants to remain innovative. We haven’t had to downsize because of the crises that the biomed sector has undergone in the past two years."
And how do you see your future?
"Within two years, we’ll reach a situation in which we’ll no longer be dependent on raising money. I don’t say that we’re already not dependent on raising money today, only because we’re very ambitious and we may want to hold another round, to bring the system and the company to where we dream of being. But we have already refused investment in certain circumstances.
"We don’t know whether, in the more distant future, we’ll continue with the business model of partnership in development with drug companies, or whether we’ll take greater ownership of the final product. For the time being, we’re not thinking about that, but about how to do what we’re doing now in the best possible way."
AstraZeneca chief data scientist Iker Huerga said, "Artificial Intelligence is transforming cancer drug discovery and clinical development. We are very pleased to collaborate with Immunai to leverage their innovative platform to enhance our data-driven R&D strategy and glean potential new insights into mechanisms of action of immunotherapies."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 26, 2024.
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