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Aqemia, a next-generation pharmaceutical company, announced on Wednesday that it has entered into a new research collaboration with Sanofi. According to the company’s press release, this new agreement follows a Research Collaboration initiated at the end of 2020 by Sanofi to bring Aqemia’s unique technologies to the design and discovery of new molecules in several projects in oncology, a therapeutic priority. domain for Sanofi.

This first collaboration resulted in promising molecules for an oncology program, for which Sanofi and Aqemia have decided to continue their joint efforts, says the company.

“Aqemia will take responsibility for the AI-based design of optimized molecules that meet multiple small molecule design goals, including potency and selectivity in a priority oncology project. Unlike most AI-based technologies that need experimental data to train their algorithms before starting design, Aqemia will tackle the drug discovery project by generating its own data with quantum physics-based calculations. and statistics, the company said.

Additionally, this collaboration includes an undisclosed upfront payment from Sanofi.

“We are truly proud of the results achieved in the first Sanofi-Aqemia collaboration in oncology and are excited to continue working together to accelerate important oncology projects. He added: “This follow-up to our first collaborative project with Sanofi, a world leader in the pharmaceutical industry, demonstrates our ability to rapidly generate new potent and selective compounds for a given target, and we look forward to developing it. to dozens of drug discovery projects,” said Maximilien Levesque, CEO and co-founder of Aqemia, in a statement.

“We are also extremely excited about the promising results achieved by Aqemia using its proprietary and disruptive technology to design potent inhibitors on given targets. We look forward to extending our collaboration to accelerate our candidate search process for the benefit of cancer patients,” said Laurent Schio, Head of Integrated Drug Discovery at Sanofi France in a statement.