Sanofi has entered a multi-year agreement with France-based agentic AI company Owkin to co-develop next-generation AI-driven biopharma agents.

The partnership includes a five-year licence for Owkin’s K Pro, an AI platform designed to augment drug discovery and development.

Since 2021, Sanofi and Owkin have maintained a €90m ($103.6m) collaboration focused on oncology target identification and patient subgrouping.

The scope later expanded to drug positioning within Sanofi’s immunology pipeline. This latest phase marks the evolution of their joint efforts towards comprehensive AI integration in biopharma.

Owkin will oversee the end-to-end construction of new agentic AI tools, specifically tailored for Sanofi’s needs.

Functioning as intelligent digital assistants, these agents aim to autonomously undertake complex work in drug research and development processes.

Deployed through K Pro, these agents will supplement and strengthen Sanofi’s existing AI infrastructure.

K Pro fuses multimodal patient datasets with dedicated biological AI systems to support pharmaceutical workflows from early-stage discovery to clinical development.

The platform aims to enhance competitive intelligence, support faster and more informed decision-making, and improve accuracy across the industry value chain.

Owkin CEO and co-founder Thomas Clozel said: “Building on our collaboration with Sanofi, this marks a shift toward truly embedded AI.

“Owkin believes that, with K Pro, Sanofi can further harness agentic systems within their own workflows, unlocking the full value of their data to accelerate better decisions across drug development.”

Sanofi chief digital officer Emmanuel Frenehard said: “Across Sanofi, we are continually investing in frontier AI solutions with the potential to accelerate and improve decision-making throughout the drug development life cycle.

“By implementing purpose-built agentic systems into our workflows, we aim to empower our teams to operate with greater speed, depth, and confidence as we continue to work to deliver transformative outcomes for patients.”

K Pro’s ongoing development supports Owkin’s goal of achieving biological artificial superintelligence to transform pharmaceutical research and development by addressing previously unsolved challenges and driving future drug discoveries.

Last month, Sanofi received a priority review from the US Food and Drug Administration for its new drug application for venglustat, an oral glucosylceramide synthase inhibitor (GCSi) intended for the treatment of type 3 Gaucher disease (GD3).