AstraZeneca has inked a billion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI)-powered drug discovery partnership and licensing deal with insitro, to identify novel targets and therapies for a range of cardiometabolic diseases.
Through this partnership, the pair will focus on creating drugs to fulfil unmet needs and address the underlying drivers of disease in both metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) and heart muscle-impacting cardiomyopathies.
In exchange for an upfront payment of $40m and around $1.46bn in potential development and commercial milestones, AstraZeneca will secure the exclusive global rights to develop selected programmes developed through this partnership. The UK-Swedish pharma giant will also award insitro single-digit royalties on global sales of the fruits of this collaboration, provided they make it to market.
At the heart of this partnership is insitro’s Virtual Human AI platform trained on large-scale human and cellular data, which the biotech uses to identify causal disease biology.
According to insitro’s founder and CEO, Daphne Koller, applying AI to complex datasets around MASH and cardiomyopathies can allow the pair to “unlock greater discovery power” and reveal new insights into the genetics behind such diseases.
“Our platform simultaneously deconvolutes disease biology and identifies causal drivers of disease pathologies,” Koller commented, adding that pairing expertise with AstraZeneca will allow the duo to scale with the potential to more rapidly progress novel programmes through the development stages to patients.
AstraZeneca targets increasingly lucrative MASH arena
AstraZeneca forges its collaboration as the company looks to deepen its legacy in the cardiovascular, renal and metabolic (CVRM) segment. Currently, the pharma giant has a plethora of marketed medicines in this disease area – including blockbuster SGLT2 inhibitor, Farxiga (dapagliflozin), which is now subject to generic erosion due to its US loss of market exclusivity earlier this year.
It also marks a doubling down on AstraZeneca’s intent to enter the MASH market, as it is currently exploring the potential of a small molecule FAP inhibitor, AZD2389, in Phase II trials. The company hopes it will demonstrate better efficacy than its former antisense oligonucleotide MASH candidate, AZD2693, which it scrapped after it produced lacklustre results in a Phase II study.
AstraZeneca makes moves toward the MASH market as it becomes increasingly lucrative, with a recent report from GlobalData, parent company of Pharmaceutical Technology, forecasting that the segment will balloon from a value of $802.3m in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.2% to a value of $20.3bn by 2032.
This growth, analysts say, will primarily be fuelled by the anticipated launch of several pipeline candidates and uptake of established drugs such as Madrigal Pharmaceutical’s first-to-market Rezdiffra (resmetirom) and Novo’s blockbuster glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1RA) therapy, Wegovy (semaglutide), as well as an anticipated uptick in the use of non-invasive tests for diagnosing and managing the disease.
With this shifting MASH landscape, GlobalData analysts also point to burgeoning competition in this space, the flames of which are stoked by the potential emergence of further incretin therapies and alternative investigational antifibrotics on the market.
