Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Inceptive Nucleics, Inc. have entered into a strategic collaboration aimed at accelerating the discovery and development of RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics through the use of artificial intelligence.

The agreement is valued at up to $2 billion and includes an upfront consideration of $30 million, comprising cash and an equity investment in Inceptive. The AI company is also eligible for additional payments linked to preclinical, regulatory and commercial milestones.

Under the collaboration, Alnylam will combine its RNAi research and development capabilities with Inceptive’s generative AI models to speed up the identification and optimisation of new RNAi medicines. The partnership supports Alnylam’s pipeline expansion objectives under its Alnylam 2030 strategy.

Inceptive’s foundation models are designed to learn biological patterns and apply them across multiple therapeutic areas without requiring retraining. During initial joint research, the models demonstrated the ability to analyse relatively small datasets and generate insights into small interfering RNA (siRNA) molecules, the active components used in RNAi therapies.

The collaboration will focus on improving siRNA design by modelling target messenger RNA (mRNA), exploring new sequence combinations and chemical modifications, and identifying candidates with the potential for enhanced potency and efficacy. The aim is to help Alnylam prioritise the most promising therapeutic molecules and improve research productivity.

The partnership combines Alnylam’s more than two decades of RNAi expertise and proprietary siRNA data with Inceptive’s AI capabilities. Alnylam’s platform has already supported the development of six approved medicines, while Inceptive specialises in building AI models for sequence-based medicines.

In addition to technology access, the agreement provides Alnylam with expertise from Inceptive’s AI research team, including co-founder and chief executive officer Jakob Uszkoreit, who is recognised as one of the co-inventors of the Transformer architecture that underpins many modern AI systems.

The companies believe the collaboration will expand opportunities in nucleic acid-based drug design and accelerate the development of innovative RNAi therapies for future clinical use.

 

Source: alnylam.com

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