Exscientia Initiates Sixth AI Drug Discovery Partnership

OXFORD, England, January 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --

Exscientia to receive up to CHF 67 million in upfront payments, research support, and milestone payments in discovery collaboration with Roche

Exscientia - the world-leading Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company - is pleased to announce a drug discovery collaboration with Roche.

Exscientia will apply its cutting-edge, Centaur Chemist^™, AI drug discovery platform to design pre-clinical drug candidates for Roche. Roche has the exclusive rights to develop and market the drug candidates resulting from the collaboration.

Exscientia receives upfront and research funding as well as pre-clinical, development and commercial milestone payments. Together, the combined financial reward is worth up to CHF 67 million to Exscientia, plus tiered royalties on the annual net sales of any products resulting from the collaboration. No further financial details are disclosed.

Andrew Hopkins, CEO of Exscientia, said: "The application of AI into early stage drug discovery has the potential to offer transformational benefits in terms of productivity and quality to the generation of new medicines. Increasingly, we are seeing in our own pipeline projects and with our ongoing collaborations, the success of our AI platform in drug discovery. This new partnership with Roche demonstrates the value of our AI-driven platform and its potential to deliver high value assets. We are very pleased to begin this exciting project with such a respected partner."

About Exscientia 

Exscientia is at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery and design. By fusing the power of AI with the discovery experience of seasoned drug hunters, Exscientia is the first company to automate drug design, surpassing conventional approaches.

Exscientia's innovative Centaur Chemist™ platform enables breakthrough productivity gains as well as new approaches to improve drug efficacy. Novel compounds are automatically designed and prioritised for synthesis by its AI systems, which rapidly evolve compounds towards the desired candidate criteria for clinical development.

Exscientia systems learn from both existing data resources and experimental data from each design cycle. The principle is similar to how a human would learn, but the AI process is far more effective at identifying and assimilating multiple subtle and complex trends to balance potency, selectivity and pharmacokinetic criteria.

As a result, the AI-driven process is more likely to achieve the end goal and to do this more rapidly and efficiently than traditional human endeavour.

Exscientia is collaborating with several leading pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, including GSK, Sanofi and Evotec.

Exscientia has its headquarters in Oxford, UK with offices in the UK, USA and Japan. For more information visit www.exscientia.co.uk or follow us on Twitter @exscientialtd