Sanofi invests $180 million in Owkin’s AI to advance oncology pipeline

Sanofi announced today an equity investment of $180 million and a new strategic collaboration with Owkin comprised of discovery and development programmes in four exclusive types of cancer, with a total payment of $90 million for three years plus additional research milestone-based payments.

Owkin, an artificial intelligence (AI) and precision medicine company founded in 2016, builds best-in-class predictive biomedical AI models and robust data sets. The collaboration aspires to optimise clinical trial design and detect predictive biomarkers for diseases and treatment outcomes and will allow Sanofi to work closely with Owkin in identifying new oncology treatments across four cancers cancers: non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), triple negative breast cancer, mesothelioma and multiple myeloma.

According to Sanofi, the company will leverage the Owkin Platform in order to find new biomarkers and therapeutic targets, building prognostic models, and predicting response to treatment from multimodal patient data. 

“Owkin’s mission is to improve patient’s lives by using our platform to discover and develop the right treatment for every patient,” stated Dr Thomas Clozel, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Owkin. “We believe that the future of precision medicine lies in technologies that can unlock insights from the vast amount of patient data in hospitals and research centers in a privacy-preserving and secure way. This landmark partnership with Sanofi will see federated learning used to create research collaborations at a truly unprecedented scale. The future of AI to transform how we develop treatments is incredibly bright, and we are proud to partner with Sanofi on this mission.”

“We look forward to working with our colleagues at Owkin to analyse data from hundreds of thousands of patients,” added Dr John Reed, Global Head of Research and Development at Sanofi. “Sanofi’s investment in the company includes a three-year agreement that will help discover and develop new treatments for NSCLC, triple negative breast cancer, mesothelioma and multiple myeloma. This partnership will help accelerate our ambitious oncology program as we advance a rich pipeline of medicines to address unmet patient needs.”