Incyte is paying Genesis $80 million upfront to expand use of its partner’s AI platform across a broader range of drug targets, continuing the biotech’s rapid embrace of AI in drug discovery and development.
Delaware-based Incyte partnered with Genesis in February 2025. That deal, which included $30 million upfront, positioned the companies to collaborate on two targets and gave Incyte the option to nominate a third target for a predetermined fee. Genesis has now secured an expanded agreement after demonstrating how its AI platform can discover and optimize small molecules against complex targets.
Under the expanded agreement, the partners will work on at least five new targets selected by Incyte. The deal also gives the biotech the option to nominate additional collaboration targets over time. In return, Incyte has paid the upfront fee and made a $40 million equity investment in Genesis.
The agreement includes up to $232 million in milestones per program, bringing the potential value of the deal to more than $1 billion across the first five targets. Reaching that figure would require the partners to secure approvals across multiple indications and major markets while also hitting commercial sales milestones. If Incyte adds more targets, the deal’s total potential value could climb by several billion dollars.
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The terms represent a major, albeit heavily backloaded, bet on Genesis and its generative and predictive AI platform, GEMS. Chemists use the platform to create drug candidates, predict their properties, interrogate those predictions and decide what to synthesize, with AI agents orchestrating models that include Genesis’ 3D structure prediction technology, Pearl.
Partnering with Incyte could further strengthen GEMS, with Genesis using its partner’s data in a secure manner to train its platform. The arrangement is one of the first major pharma-AI alliances designed to support large-scale foundation model training using a partner’s proprietary experimental data, the companies said. Incyte will also provide recurring research funding to Genesis to support AI model training and inference compute workloads.
Genesis, a 2023 Fierce 15 honoree, raised $200 million in 2023 and inked a deal with Gilead Sciences in 2024. The activity has cemented Genesis’ status as a player in the rapidly emerging AI drug discovery space. News of the expanded Incyte deal came one day after the biotech partnered with Edison Scientific to deploy an AI scientist across its drug discovery and development operations.
Bristol Myers Squibb added to the AI news flow Wednesday, unveiling an agreement with Anthropic to use Claude to accelerate drug discovery, development and delivery. Anthropic quoted representatives from Genmab, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi when it launched Claude for Life Sciences last year. Novo and Sanofi have also inked deals with Anthropic rival OpenAI, while Merck & Co. recently partnered with Google.
