AstraZeneca is paying insitro $40 million upfront to find novel drug targets for liver and heart diseases using artificial intelligence.
The deal, which features up to $1.46 billion in development and commercial milestones, is underpinned by insitro’s AI platform. By combining human and cellular data with AI-enabled target identification, the platform is designed to identify causal disease biology. AstraZeneca asked insitro to apply the platform to metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) and cardiomyopathies.
“MASH and cardiomyopathies are prevalent, underdiagnosed diseases where high-content data holds immense signal for uncovering disease drivers,” insitro CEO Daphne Koller said in a statement. “By applying AI to these complex datasets, we can unlock greater discovery power and reveal novel genetic insights.”
AstraZeneca will have exclusive worldwide rights to advance selected programs from the collaboration. The combination of insitro’s platform and AstraZeneca’s clinical development and regulatory expertise could accelerate programs, Koller said.
The deal further expands AstraZeneca's push into AI. As well as investing in its own capabilities, the Big Pharma company has partnered with the AI-enabled Algen Biotechnologies to find immunology targets, acquired Modella AI and penned an agentic AI licensing deal with Owkin.
AstraZeneca is the latest in a series of large biopharma companies to adopt insitro’s platform. In 2019, Gilead entered into a deal with insitro, followed by Bristol Myers Squibb in 2020. BMS has extended and expanded the deal over the years.
Eli Lilly teamed up with insitro in 2024, leading to a platform being made available to select biotechs in 2025.
While the financial terms of these deals are backloaded, the pacts have still given insitro additional capital as it pursues development of its own pipeline. The company raised $400 million in 2021 and now has an early-stage portfolio spanning liver fat and fibrosis, obesity, neuroscience and ophthalmology.