Novo Nordisk and Valo Health have expanded their 16-month-old collaboration into an up-to-$4.6 billion-plus artificial intelligence (AI) partnership aimed at discovering and developing up to 20 treatments for obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
The expanded partnership marks a 70% jump in potential value from the 11-program collaboration initially launched by the companies in 2023, with a primary focus on cardiovascular disease. That collaboration was valued at up to $2.7 billion in milestones, plus R&D funding and potential royalty payments.
In announcing their expanded partnership, Novo Nordisk and Valo said they had already identified “several novel targets that may form the basis of differentiated cardiometabolic drug programs.” The companies added that they were actively working on “multiple” small molecule preclinical drug discovery programs, without offering details.
“We are very pleased with the progress we have made together with Valo during the first year of our collaboration, and we are excited to expand the scope to put a stronger focus on obesity and type 2 diabetes in addition to cardiovascular disease,” Marcus Schindler, PhD, Novo Nordisk’s executive vice president and CSO, said in a statement.
The expanded partnership, as with the original collaboration, will combine Novo Nordisk’s expertise in cardiometabolic diseases, the companies’ joint capabilities in human data and genetics, and Valo’s Opal Computational Platform™, in order to glean insights from human genetic and longitudinal patient data in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
“The partnership fully leverages the Opal Computational Platform by seeking to identify novel therapeutic targets in large real-world patient datasets, validate those targets using human preclinical models, and develop therapeutics against those targets with human-centric AI small molecule design,” stated Brian Alexander, MD, CEO of Valo Health.
Opal is an AI-based combined computational, chemistry, and tissue production platform that collects a combination of exclusive and publicly available patient data for use in developing machine learning models. The data and insights are combined using what Valo says are proprietary methodologies.
“Just getting started”
“Data are generated both to advance drug programs and to improve machine learning models, ensuring that the Opal platform increases in quality to enable precise, actionable pathophysiological insights,” Valo states on its website. “These models help us to predict how and when a disease will progress, if and how a drug will perform before it even touches a person, to select the targets that address diseases, how to design a clinical study based on the data-driven nature of a disease… and we’re just getting started.”
“We aim to become the standard technology platform for drug development,” Valo declares.
In addition to data, Opal integrates wet lab chemistry and Valo’s Biowire technology to provide more effective data generation and simulations. Biowire enables Valo to produce human-relevant tissue in the lab, which according to the company enables it to accurately test drug compounds before clinical trials, providing “crucial” insight into mechanism and drug response.
Under the expanded partnership, Novo Nordisk has agreed to pay Valo $190 million upfront, up-to-$4.6 billion in milestones, plus R&D funding and potential royalty payments.
“This level of investment is a testament to our close partnership in deploying human-centric artificial intelligence to rapidly discover and develop novel cardiovascular and metabolic disease therapeutics,” added Alexander, who is also a CEO-partner with Flagship Pioneering.
Flagship Pioneering is the venture/accelerator giant that founded and initially capitalized Valo in 2019. The following year, Flagship Pioneering formally announced the launch of privately-held Valo, joining with other undisclosed investors to bring the company’s total financing to nearly $100 million.
Valo is headquartered in Lexington, MA, with offices in New York and Tel Aviv.
Novo Nordisk, based in Bagsværd, Denmark, saw its shares on Nasdaq Copenhagen rise 3% on the news, from DKK 602.80 ($83.20) to DKK 619.50 ($85.50) at the close of trading today.
“We have already begun to realize the potential of combining the capabilities of Valo and Novo Nordisk to advance multiple AI-powered, human-centric programs, and we believe this partnership will help Novo Nordisk fulfill our ambition to expand the number of new drug programs we bring to the clinic,” Schindler added.
