Global biopharma company, Almirall S.A. focuses on dermatology while Absci Corporation focuses on generative AI creation. The two announced a partnership on November 14 to commercialize AI therapeutics to fight chronic and debilitating dermatological diseases.
The partnership represents Almirall’s first de novo AI drug collaboration, and it comes only months after Absci announced it could design and validate de novo therapeutic antibodies using its ‘zero-shot’ generative AI.
Under the terms of the partnership, Absci will apply its de novo generative AI technology to create and commercialize therapeutic candidates for two dermatological targets. In addition to product royalties, Absci is eligible to receive up to approximately $650 million in upfront fees, R&D, and post-approval milestone payments across the two programs if all milestones are completed.
“Almirall chose Absci because their de novo platform brings truly novel innovation in solving the industry’s most challenging targets facing high unmet medical need,” said Almirall executive VP of R&D and CSO Karl Ziegelbauer.
“Our partnership underlines Almirall’s commitment to target innovative approaches to help patients suffering from severe skin diseases to achieve their dream of leading a healthy life.”
Absci founder and CEO Sean McClain said the partnership marked an important leap forward for dermatological drug development.
He said: “The partnership is poised to transform the lives of millions managing skin conditions. We believe the collaboration will generate tremendous scientific and technical insights for using AI drug creation to treat chronic inflammatory diseases more broadly. Working with a global leader and visionary in skin disease on this ambitious project will accelerate our journey in creating better biologics for a broad range of diseases affecting millions daily.”
Almirall focuses on medical dermatology and works with scientists and healthcare professionals to address patients' needs through science to improve their lives.
Absci combines AI with scalable wet lab technologies to create better biologics for patients, faster. Its Integrated Drug Creation platform unlocks the potential to accelerate time to clinic and increase the probability of success by optimizing multiple drug characteristics important to both development and therapeutic benefit.
Absci can screen billions of cells a week with its data, AI, and wet lab, this allows it to go from AI-designed antibodies to wet lab validated candidates in as little as six weeks.