EQRx puts Exscientia's AI on drug discovery duty to develop low-cost cancer drugs

What do you get when you cross an artificial-intelligence-powered platform for drug discovery with a corporate goal of developing cancer drugs at radically low prices? Exscientia and EQRx are determined to find out, with the help of a newly formed strategic collaboration.

Through their partnership, Exscientia’s AI platform will identify potential targets for new treatments and lead the discovery charge. EQRx will take over development once the compounds are ready for human clinical trials and shepherd them to commercialization.

The two companies hope to develop small-molecule drug candidates across a range of therapeutic areas but with particular focuses on oncology and immunology.

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They also aim to set a new precedent for highly efficient and effective drug discovery and development by improving each potential drug’s chances of success from the beginning and ultimately enabling the companies and others like them “to bring the next generation of innovative medicines to patients faster and at a fraction of the cost,” according to EQRx CEO Alexis Borisy.

Financial terms of their collaboration agreement were not disclosed, but the companies said they will equally share all the overall costs of drug discovery, development and distribution.

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The products of the partnership will join the other biologics and small-molecule therapeutics in EQRx’s pipeline. The biotech launched at the beginning of last year with $200 million in its pocket and a plan to do for the pharmaceutical industry what JetBlue and Southwest did for the airline industry—that is, develop an ultra-efficient business model that ultimately drives down costs across the entire sector.

To fulfill that mission, the 2020 Fierce Biotech Fierce 15 winner has licensed a couple of existing assets and is also developing its own range of “equivalars,” which will be modeled after existing drugs but come with much lower price tags.

Exscientia, meanwhile, has been just as busy. Since the beginning of the year, it has racked up a handful of high-profile deals, including a drug discovery partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb that brought Exscientia $50 million upfront and $125 million for near-term successes, with a potential long-term payout of up to $1.2 billion or more.

Earlier this month, now flush with cash, Exscientia shelled out about $60 million to acquire Austrian AI developer Allcyte. Exscientia will add Allcyte’s automated software—which predicts how well individual patients will respond to cancer treatments—to its own platform, allowing it to take a precision medicine approach to designing new drugs.