Takeda Pharmaceutical will apply Iambic Therapeutics’ artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies and wet lab capabilities to design and develop small molecule drugs starting with two of Takeda’s therapeutic areas through a multi-year tech and discovery collaboration that could generate more than $1.7 billion for the San Diego biotech, the companies said. Takeda has agreed to use Iambic’s AI drug discovery models toward advancing a set of high-priority small molecule programs in the pharma’s therapeutic areas of oncology and gastrointestinal and inflammation. In addition to oncology and gastrointestinal and inflammation, Takeda’s areas of therapeutic focus include neuroscience, plasma-derived therapies, rare diseases, and vaccines. “Iambic has shown success in cancer and other domains and believes that our computational and experimental approaches are widely applicable across therapeutic domains and event therapeutic modality,” Michael Secora, Iambic’s CFO and chief corporate development officer, told GEN. Through the collaboration, Takeda is being granted access to Iambic technologies for AI drug discovery. One technology is Enchant, a multimodal transformer model trained on dozens of data modalities and sources from across drug discovery and development. Enchant is a computational tool designed to facilitate preclinical and clinical endpoint prediction by supplementing clinical data with laboratory data, with the goal of making reliable predictions of human pharmacokinetics and other clinical drug properties from the earliest stages of discovery programs. Michael Secora, Iambic Therapeutics’ CFO and chief corporate development officer Last year, Iambic announced Enchant v2, an upgraded version of the model that is designed to provide accurate predictions for dozens of…
