Incyte will partner with Genesis Therapeutics to research, discover, and develop small molecule treatments through a collaboration that could generate at least up to $620 million for Genesis, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based drug developer.
The companies have agreed to discover and optimize at least two initial small molecule programs through Genesis’s AI platform, Genesis Exploration of Molecular Space (GEMS). GEMS is designed to generate and optimize molecules for complex targets by integrating proprietary AI methods that include language models, diffusion models, and physical machine learning (ML) simulations.
Incyte has been granted exclusive rights for potential clinical development and commercialization of the products to be developed through the collaboration.
Until now, Incyte has built a pipeline of products in oncology as well as inflammation and autoimmunity, while Genesis has focused on using GEMS to develop a pipeline in oncology as well as the broader field of immunology.
“Once we talked about our respective interests and strengths, it was really natural to talk about a formal collaboration from there,” Genesis Therapeutics founder and CEO Evan Feinberg, PhD, told GEN Edge.
The companies have not disclosed the targets they plan to develop—both to be selected by Incyte—or their therapeutic areas of focus.
“What I can say is we’re working on some exciting biology together that’s been provided by Incyte,” Feinberg said. “We believe that Genesis’s GEMS AI platform’s repeated ability to drug challenging targets will mean we’ll be able to generate some really exciting drug candidates as part of the collaboration.”
“We believe pairing Incyte’s world-class expertise in drug discovery development with the Genesis GEMS AI platform will be quite synergistic and allow us to continue both Insight’s long history of creating pioneering medicines and further Genesis’s impact in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries as well,” Feinberg added.
Incyte has agreed to pay Genesis $30 million upfront, plus up to $295 million in payments per target—up to $590 million for the two initial targets—tied to achieving development, regulatory, and commercial milestones. Genesis is also eligible to receive tiered royalties on sales of any collaboration products following approval.
In addition to the two initial targets, Incyte has the option to nominate an additional target for an undisclosed predetermined fee.
“Partnering with Genesis Therapeutics presents a unique opportunity to leverage their AI technologies to accelerate the discovery of breakthrough small molecules for high-impact targets in our pipeline,” Pablo J. Cagnoni, MD, president and head of research and development at Incyte, said in a statement.
Biopharma partnerships
Incyte is the fourth and latest biopharma giant to partner with Genesis on an AI-focused drug discovery and development collaboration applying GEMS. The other three:
- Gilead Sciences—Small molecule therapies across multiple undisclosed targets. Gilead agreed to pay $35 million across three targets and holds an option to nominate additional targets for an undisclosed predetermined per-target fee. Gilead also agreed to pay additional payments tied to achieving preclinical, development, regulatory, and commercial milestones, plus tiered royalties on net sales of commercialized products.
- Eli Lilly—Up-to-$670 million partnership ($20 million of it upfront) to discover novel therapies for up to five targets across a range of therapeutic areas, initiated in 2022.
- Genentech, a Member of the Roche Group—a multi-target, multi-disease effort launched in 2020. Two years later, Genentech described its targets of interest as “challenging targets that would elude other methods.” The value of the collaboration has not been disclosed.
Genesis spun out in 2019 from the Stanford University lab of Vijay Pande, PhD, who is now general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and the founding general partner of a16z’s bio funds. Feinberg was a graduate student in Pande’s lab who co-invented and co-authored key peer-reviewed papers detailing deep learning technologies.
In 2020, Genesis won a $52 million Series A financing. The company has grown since then to raise more than $300 million—most of that consisting of a $200 million Series B financing round completed in 2023.
Genesis’ investors included NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia, the Silicon Valley-based microprocessing giant that has expanded its market-leading footprint in AI chips to the life industries that include the life sciences. In November, NVentures raised its stake in Genesis by investing what Feinberg told GEN Edge was an undisclosed “incremental additional amount” in his company.
“There are actually no easy targets in drug discovery. There’s only hard, harder, and really, really hard targets. So, drug discovery is a team sport. It requires biologists, chemists, DNPK scientists, all to work together. But whereas that’s necessary, it’s not sufficient,” Feinberg observed.
“What we provide is a supercharged drug discovery search engine, as it were, both searching vast chemical space and ranking all those potential molecules for their predicted potency, selectivity, and ADME more accurately than otherwise,” Feinberg added. “Because of our platform, we confer the ability for our own internal scientists and for our external partners to arrive at molecules with superior potency, selectivity, and ADME profiles than they would otherwise be able to without our technology.”
