Aqemia and Sanofi have expanded their multi-year drug discovery collaboration, with the France-based AI company announcing the nomination of a new therapeutic target under the partnership first struck in December 2023. The expansion makes Aqemia eligible for up to USD 140 million in aggregate upfront and milestone payments across all programs in the deal, though the company did not disclose the size of the specific payment tied to this latest target nomination.
The two firms’ collaboration spans early hit identification through development candidate selection, with Sanofi retaining responsibility for wet lab validation, clinical development and commercialization of any resulting compounds. For Sanofi, the deal reflects a broader pattern of stacking AI partnerships across discovery, patient recruitment and biological modeling rather than betting on a single computational platform.
The collaboration centers on Qemi, Aqemia’s physics-based generative AI platform, which the company positions as distinct from data-hungry machine learning approaches because it generates its own training data through physics-based calculations rather than relying on large historical datasets. That design is meant to address first-in-class targets where chemical data is scarce, a category Aqemia says has been a focus area of the Sanofi work. Research teams in Paris and London use the platform to design candidate molecules against targets nominated by Sanofi scientists based in Boston, Frankfurt and Paris. No specific target, indication or molecule was disclosed in connection with this expansion.