Exscientia Enters $70M Collaboration to Develop Antiviral Therapeutics Against Coronavirus and Other Viruses With Pandemic Potential

Exscientia, an AI-driven pharmatech company with a mission to radically improve how drugs are discovered, today announced a four-year collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a non-profit focused on fighting global poverty, disease, and inequity, to develop small molecule therapeutics that tackle the current coronavirus pandemic and help prepare for future pandemics. The collaboration will initially focus on developing broad-spectrum coronavirus agents (e.g., SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, MERS), including accelerating Exscientia’s lead programme, which targets the main protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. Subsequently, the collaboration will expand to develop therapeutics for influenza and Paramyxoviridae (e.g., Nipah), with the potential to develop additional programmes as identified by the joint team.

Exscientia’s AI-driven platform enables scientific concepts to be rapidly translated into precision-designed therapeutic candidates, with a goal of increasing probability of success and an accelerated path to the patient.

“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic underscores the urgency to develop safe and effective broad-spectrum drugs to expand our armoury against viruses and their variants. We need to fight today’s pandemic but also ensure we are prepared with new drugs to combat viruses with future pandemic potential. We are honoured to work alongside the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance this mission by ensuring accessibility and affordability of these therapeutics globally,” commented Andrew Hopkins, Chief Executive Officer of Exscientia. “We believe that our AI-driven platform can accelerate the creation of better, more effective therapeutics that can address some of the world’s most critical and emerging health risks.”

"Small molecule therapeutics could provide a superior approach to guard global health," said Denise Barrault, Director of Portfolio Management at Exscientia. "Certain targets are prevalent across families of viruses, meaning that potent therapeutics could be broadly effective across multiple virus families. Further, this collaboration will focus on evaluating protein targets that are evolutionarily conserved and are less likely to develop resistance.”

The Gates Foundation’s programme-related investment in Exscientia was made through its Strategic Investment Fund (SIF), a team that uses a suite of financial tools to address market failures and incentivise private enterprise to develop affordable and accessible products and services for low-income populations. SIF investments are intended to further the Gates Foundation’s programmatic goals, not to generate financial returns. If any profit is generated by an investment, it will be used solely for charitable purposes through Gates Foundation philanthropic programmes.

Under the terms of the agreement, Exscientia will receive a $35 million equity investment from the SIF, with the potential for additional grant funding to help advance development candidates through commercialisation. The Gates Foundation’s programme-related investment is subject to certain closing conditions being satisfied. As a global leader in pandemic preparedness, the Gates Foundation will also contribute its extensive expertise in funding the design, development, and distribution of antiviral drugs. Exscientia will lead the initial antiviral projects and apply its platform technology to research, discover, and develop up to five Phase 1-ready small molecule therapeutics for future pandemic preparedness. Exscientia will provide $35 million in matching contributions, through operations and funding for third party activities. Exscientia maintains worldwide rights to all developed products with a commitment to make the antiviral products affordable and accessible to people in developing countries.

In July, Exscientia received a grant from the Gates Foundation to expedite the optimisation of a new class of COVID-19 therapeutics created using its AI drug design platform, focused on a novel class of inhibitors targeting the SARS-CoV-2’s main protease enzyme, Mpro, the causative agent of COVID-19. This work will continue under the collaboration announced today. Additionally, in 2020, the foundation awarded a $4.2 million grant to Exscientia to identify new innovative treatments for malaria and tuberculosis – two of the world’s leading infectious disease killers – as well as new medicines for non-hormonal contraception.

About Exscientia

Exscientia is an AI-driven pharmatech company committed to discovering, designing, and developing the best possible drugs in the fastest and most effective manner. Exscientia is the first company to progress AI-designed small molecules into the clinical setting and repeatedly demonstrate the ability of AI to transform how drug candidates are created. Exscientia’s AI platform has now designed three drugs that are in Phase 1 human clinical trials.

Drug design is precision engineering at the molecular scale. Exscientia has built dedicated AI systems that efficiently learn from the widest range of data and consistently reapply enhanced knowledge through iterations of design. Because Exscientia’s AI platform learns more effectively and rapidly than human-led efforts alone, candidate molecules satisfying complex therapeutic requirements are created with revolutionary efficiency. Exscientia believes that designing better drugs, faster, will allow the best ideas of science to rapidly become the best medicines for patients.

Exscientia has offices in Oxford, Vienna, Dundee, Miami and Osaka. For more information visit us at https://www.exscientia.ai or follow us on Twitter @exscientiaAI.

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