Alnylam Pharmaceuticals said on Wednesday that it has entered into a partnership with AI-driven biotech company Inceptive in a deal valued at up to $2 billion. The collaboration aims to leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery and development of RNA-based medicines, helping to speed up the process of bringing new treatments to market.
- Alnylam Pharmaceuticals will pay $30 million upfront, which includes both cash and an equity investment in privately held Inceptive, along with additional milestone-based payments linked to pre-clinical progress, regulatory approvals, and future sales performance.
- The partnership combines Alnylam’s RNAi drug development platform and over 20 years of scientific data with Inceptive’s AI models to accelerate the design and selection of drug candidates.
- Inceptive focuses on building AI models for sequence-based medicines, including RNAi therapeutics.
- RNAi medicines work by silencing specific disease-related genes, which helps reduce the production of harmful proteins in the body.
- Alnylam Pharmaceuticals stated that this collaboration supports its “Alnylam 2030” strategy aimed at expanding its drug pipeline.
- Inceptive’s foundation model is designed to learn biological patterns and adapt across multiple therapeutic areas without the need for retraining.
- The collaboration is expected to help Alnylam prioritize the most promising drug molecules and improve overall experimental productivity.
- Following the announcement, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals shares rose by more than 2% in extended trading.
About Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals is a biopharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It focuses on developing innovative medicines using RNA interference (RNAi) technology. These medicines work by turning off disease-causing genes before harmful proteins can be produced, helping to treat both rare genetic disorders and more common diseases. RNA interference (RNAi) is a natural process in the body that helps control how genes are expressed. Alnylam uses this process to create small interfering RNA (siRNA) medicines, which block specific messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules and stop the production of faulty proteins at their source.
