UCB and Cradle have entered a strategic collaboration to advance UCB's digital antibody discovery and engineering program. The program draws on UCB's own antibody discovery platform combined with computational science, disease biology expertise and a network of technology and research partners.
Under the collaboration, UCB will apply Cradle's AI-driven protein design and engineering platform within selected discovery projects from hit generation through lead optimization and preclinical readiness.
As UCB scientists use the Cradle platform across programs, experimental results will continuously feed back into program-specific models. The companies said this creates a compounding learning loop, or "lab-in-the-loop," that supports scientists in applying their expertise and judgment to optimize candidates across the full set of properties required for success and accelerate progression toward a potential candidate.
UCB Chief Scientific Officer Alistair Henry said adding Cradle's end-to-end platform across the discovery pipeline allows the company to apply computational approaches in a rigorous and translational way, with predictive modeling combined with wet-lab validation potentially allowing UCB to design better molecules and bring therapeutics to patients sooner.
Cradle CEO and co-founder Stef van Grieken said AI will have its greatest impact on biologics R&D when it becomes part of how scientists work across the discovery organization, and that the partnership gives scientists a common platform to apply AI to more programs, modalities and complex engineering challenges.
Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed. Cradle is based in Amsterdam, Zürich and the United States.
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