Alnylam has partnered with the person who helped put the “T” in ChatGPT, paying $30 million to work with Jakob Uszkoreit’s Inceptive Nucleics on artificial intelligence-enabled drug design.
While working at Google, Uszkoreit co-authored a paper that proposed the Transformer, providing the basis for the AI explosion and creating a term that gave ChatGPT one of its initials. In 2021, Uszkoreit co-founded Inceptive with Rhiju Das, Ph.D., a biochemistry professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Inceptive raised $120 million from backers including Nvidia across rounds in 2021 and 2023.
Having used the money to apply AI to sequence-based medicines such as siRNA, Inceptive has landed a deal with a leader in its area of specialization. Alnylam is paying $30 million upfront and committing up to $2 billion in preclinical, regulatory and commercial sales milestones to work with Inceptive.
Inceptive has trained its models on sequence, function and structure data. By using a mix of data, the startup aims to create models that learn the patterns underlying biology and generalize across programs and problems. The flexibility could enable Inceptive’s models to adapt to different modalities without retraining.
Alnylam tested the technology in joint exploratory work, showing that the model adapted to the project within weeks and provided biological insights from relatively small datasets to characterize siRNA. The experience led Alnylam to partner with Inceptive to advance siRNA design.
The partners plan to model target mRNAs and explore sequence space and novel chemical modifications to enhance potency and efficacy. Alnylam will further develop candidates that the partners predict will perform the best.
Partnering with Inceptive marks a step up in Alnylam’s adoption of AI. The biopharma has been “mining genetic databases for targets” using AI, Jeffrey Poulton, the company’s chief financial officer, said at a Morgan Stanley event in September 2025. Poulton said at the time that target discovery was one of the main areas where Alnylam was investing time and energy in AI, adding that there was “probably more to come.”
Alnylam is one of many companies moving deeper into AI. Last month, Incyte struck deals with Genesis and Edison Scientific, Bristol Myers Squibb partnered with Claude-developer Anthropic and Alphabet’s AI biotech Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1 billion.
