TechBio outfit Immunai is continuing its parade of Big Pharma partnerships with its third such pact this year, this time with German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim.
Boehringer is ponying up as much as $15 million to discover new targets on dysfunctional T cells that drive both cancers and autoimmune diseases, Immunai announced today. The deal extends through 2027, but the partners can mutually decide to expand it if they find success.
The team-up will start by harnessing Immunai’s single-cell AI platform to analyze T cells from patients with various cancers and autoimmune diseases, according to the release, in order to build a solid foundation of data. Once promising prospects are found, Immunai will turn to its wet lab to turn the targets into potential drug programs for Boehringer.
“Cancer immunology and autoimmune diseases both involve T-cell dysfunction, but they have largely been explored separately,” Immunai co-founder and CEO Noam Solomon, Ph.D., said in the release. “By taking an unbiased approach across thousands of patient samples, we hope to uncover biological insights and therapeutic opportunities that would otherwise remain hidden.”
“We apply our AI tools to actually find the most prominent and the most relevant targets that are shared across diseases,” Solomon explained to Fierce in an interview. When Boehringer gives the green light, Immunai will turn to functional perturbation in its New York City wet lab “to prove that those targets are good.”
From there, negotiations are underway over what a potentially expanded deal could look like, Solomon added.
Boehringer’s buy-in follows the forging of a new pact with Bristol Myers Squibb in January and the May expansion of Immunai’s long-standing partnership with AstraZeneca to the tune of $37.5 million.
Immunai’s database includes 50,000 single-cell samples from patients who did and did not respond to different treatments, along with healthy controls, a mix Solomon told Fierce is a particular strength.
“We are working with eight of the top 20 pharma companies,” Solomon said, adding that another reason for that is Immunai’s “obsession about the immune system and immunology,” an area many others found “infinitely complex.”
“We believe that with enough data, we'll be able to offer the type of insight that is both granular and grounded,” he said, “so we are able to offer a different approach to discovery.”
Solomon thinks his decision to launch a wet lab at the time of Immunai’s founding in 2018 was also prescient, giving the company the ability to generate its own data to feed into its models. In the current AI boom, he said, companies focused solely on software have no choice but to use the same data that is public or available for purchase.
“If you're only doing the AI,” Solomon told Fierce, there’s no guarantee that “smart kids from Stanford will not come up with a better model tomorrow.”
With its database growing, Immunai is also bent on bolstering its connections to experienced drug developers, like those at its Big Pharma partners. Former Pfizer R&D chief Mikael Dolsten, M.D., Ph.D., for example, joined the company’s board last year.
But while Immunai may seem well-positioned to one day launch its own internal drug development programs, Solomon instead sees great potential in monitoring the immune system for preventive health. He said the company can already estimate immune system age using its technology, which could one day be used to help people live longer, healthier lives.
“In 10 or 20 years, AI will do most of the work anyways,” he told Fierce. For the people who no longer need to work, he said, “We want to make sure that they can stay on the beach and not get older by being exposed to the sun.”