8th June — Owkin today announced that it has entered into a multi-year, strategic collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb to apply Owkin’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to design potentially more precise and efficient clinical trials for Bristol Myers Squibb. The collaboration will initially focus on cardiovascular diseases, and has the potential to extend into projects in other therapeutic areas.
As part of the collaboration, data from a wide network of academic medical centers and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques will be employed to enhance clinical trial design and execution with AI-powered approaches that optimize endpoint definitions, patient subgroups, and treatment effect estimation with covariate adjustment and external control arms. This new collaboration follows years of collaboration between Owkin and Bristol Myers Squibb, including a number of successful projects to identify biomarkers and improve clinical trial outcomes with covariate adjustment, using real world data.
Under the terms of the agreements, Owkin will receive $80 million in aggregate for the upfront payment and the Series B-1 equity investment by Bristol Myers Squibb and potentially further payments in excess of $100 million contingent on the collaboration achieving certain success-based milestones in conjunction with Regulatory processes. Owkin will use the equity investment to support its ambitious data generation strategy in multiple therapeutic areas with a strong focus on multimodal and rich biological data, including the most advanced spatial single-cell omics technologies.
Gilles Wainrib, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Owkin, said:
Our collaboration will see cutting-edge machine learning methods used to maximize opportunities for patients to benefit from the latest treatments as quickly and safely as possible. We are excited to start this collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb, a global leader in cardiovascular with a strong development pipeline which has the potential to change the lives of millions of patients. Our collaboration could prove transformational for patient outcomes and scientific progress, making machine learning solutions an integral part of the clinical trial process.
Venkat Sethuraman, Senior Vice President, Global Biometrics and Data Sciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, said:
We look forward to collaborating with Owkin to extend our applications of AI and machine learning to enhance our discovery and development programs with high-quality, diverse data from clinical and real world sources. In particular, cardiovascular disease is an area of significant unmet need, and where we have the opportunity to use technology in new ways to further accelerate potential breakthroughs for patients who are waiting.
About Owkin
Owkin is a French-American startup that uses artificial intelligence to find the right treatment for every patient. Our focus is to use AI to discover and develop better treatments for unmet medical needs, starting with the fight against cancer. We use AI to identify new drug candidates, de-risk and accelerate clinical trials and build diagnostic tools that improve patient outcomes. Using federated learning, a pioneering collaborative AI framework, Owkin enables medical and biopharma partners to unlock valuable insights from siloed datasets while protecting patient privacy and securing proprietary data. Owkin was co-founded by Thomas Clozel MD, a former assistant professor in clinical onco-hematology, and Gilles Wainrib, a pioneer in the field of machine learning in biology, in 2016. Owkin has raised over $300 million and became a unicorn through a $180 million investment from biopharma company Sanofi in November 2021.
Media contact: alexander.blackburn@owkin.com