Owkin announced a new multi-year collaboration with Sanofi to co-develop AI-driven biopharma agents, supported by a five-year license for K Pro, Owkin’s AI platform for drug research and development. The companies have worked together since 2021 under a €90 million strategic partnership focused initially on oncology target identification and patient subgrouping, later expanded to include drug positioning in Sanofi’s immunology pipeline.
Under the new agreement, Owkin will lead end-to-end development of AI agents tailored for Sanofi’s research and development needs. These agents are intended to function as intelligent assistants that autonomously perform complex tasks in drug R&D and will be deployed through K Pro alongside Sanofi’s existing AI capabilities.
K Pro combines multimodal patient data with specialized biological AI systems to support activities across the pharmaceutical value chain, from early discovery through clinical development, as well as to provide competitive intelligence to inform decision-making.
Owkin CEO and co-founder Thomas Clozel said the collaboration marks a shift toward more deeply integrated AI within Sanofi’s workflows, with the goal of helping the company unlock more value from its data and accelerate decision-making across drug development. Emmanuel Frenehard, Sanofi’s chief digital officer, said the company is investing in advanced AI tools to speed and improve decisions throughout the drug development lifecycle and aims to use purpose-built AI systems to support internal teams.
Owkin described K Pro’s development as part of its broader effort to use advanced biological AI approaches to address complex challenges in pharmaceutical R&D and to automate portions of the research and development process.
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