The agreement is worth an initial $18 million to Immunai, developer of an AI-based model for making drug development more efficient. Israeli company Immunai , a developer of AI-based tools for improving drug discovery processes, has announced a strategic agreement with pharmaceuticals company AstraZeneca. Immunai will receive $18 million from AstraZeneca at the initial stage of the research, but the main significance of the deal is not the initial sum, but the fact that a substantial, multi-year link is planned between the Israeli company and the British-Swedish pharmaceuticals giant - a link important enough for AstraZeneca to report it itself.
Immunai already has strategic agreements with 30 pharmaceuticals companies, most of them involving much smaller financial sums. Immunai signed a first agreement with AstraZeneca in 2022, and it is now being expanded in the current deal. Immunai has developed a system that is a model of the human body, chiefly of the immune system.
It offers use of the model to pharmaceuticals companies to improve the efficiency of drug development - to choose between various possible molecules, to choose the right combinations of drugs for trial, to choose dosages, and so on. "When we set out, we would say that we were the Google of the immune system," says Immunai CEO and co-founder Noam Solomon. "Today, we say that we’re the ChatGPT of drugs.
The researcher can ask the system - if not in text form - various questions about the worthwhileness of va.
