AstraZeneca has teamed up with insitro, the California AI biotech, to discover treatments for metabolic dysfunction associated steatohepatitis, known as MASH, and for cardiomyopathies, two disease areas where researchers have struggled to identify the root biological drivers.
Insitro will use its Virtual Human platform, which combines lab grown cell models with machine learning, to identify causal disease biology and advance AstraZeneca nominated targets to development candidate stage. AstraZeneca will then run and fund the clinical trials. The economics are back loaded: 40 million dollars upfront, up to about 1.46 billion dollars in potential development and commercial milestones, and a single digit percentage of future sales as royalties.
The deal adds AstraZeneca to a client list insitro has been assembling across the industry, after an expanded amyotrophic lateral sclerosis partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb and a collaboration with Eli Lilly on models predicting small molecule behaviour in living organisms. For AstraZeneca, the stated problem is selection itself: its biopharmaceuticals research chief told Reuters that choosing which new targets enter the discovery pipeline is one of the hardest decisions in research and development.