June 3 (Reuters) – Alnylam Pharmaceuticals said on Wednesday it has teamed up with artificial-intelligence biotech Inceptive in a deal worth up to $2 billion to use AI to speed up discovery of RNA-based medicines.
• Drugmaker Alnylam will pay $30 million upfront, including cash and an equity investment in privately held Inceptive, with additional payments tied to pre-clinical, regulatory and sales milestones.
• The partnership combines Alnylam’s RNAi drug platform and more than 20 years of data with Inceptive’s AI models to help design and select drug candidates faster.
• Inceptive focuses on developing models for sequence-based medicines such as RNAi therapeutics.
• RNAi medicines work by blocking specific disease-related genes, helping reduce harmful proteins in the body.
• Alnylam said the collaboration supports its Alnylam 2030 strategy to expand its drug pipeline.
• Inceptive’s foundation model learns the patterns underlying biology and hence can adapt to diverse therapeutic modalities without retraining.
• The collaboration aims to help Alnylam prioritize the most promising molecules and improve experimental productivity.
• Alnylam shares were up more than 2% in extended trading.
(Reporting by Kunal Das in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)