AstraZeneca (LSE/NYSE: AZN) has entered a three-year license agreement with Owkin, a privately held AI company founded in 2016 and headquartered across New York and Paris, covering K Pro, Owkin's agentic AI platform described by the company as an AI scientist for biopharma decision-making. Under the arrangement, Owkin will develop bespoke AI agents integrated into AstraZeneca's internal IT infrastructure, with initial capabilities focused on competitive intelligence and landscape forecasting for specific pharmaceutical targets, assets, and clinical trials. Financial terms were not disclosed.
K Pro is described by Owkin as an agentic AI platform built on multimodal biological data — including genomics, histopathology imaging, and clinical outcomes — and fine-tuned language models the company calls biological reasoning models. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, the platform is designed to execute multi-step scientific reasoning tasks autonomously, decomposing complex research questions and synthesizing outputs across data sources restricted to credible scientific literature. Owkin positions this architecture as distinct from retrieval-augmented generation approaches, characterizing K Pro as capable of active workflow orchestration rather than text retrieval alone.
Under the agreement, Owkin leads end-to-end development of the AI agents, which will run on K Pro and operate within AstraZeneca's governance and security frameworks. The agents are intended to reduce reliance on manual analysis for competitive intelligence questions across AstraZeneca's portfolio. The scope is enterprise-wide rather than indication-specific, covering any program where competitive landscape analysis or target forecasting is relevant.
The deal extends a prior working relationship between the two companies. Owkin and AstraZeneca previously collaborated on an AI-based germline BRCA pre-screening tool for breast cancer, with results presented at ESMO 2025 showing the BRCAura solution ruled out approximately 40% of patients unlikely to carry gBRCA mutations at 93% sensitivity. That diagnostic work has since been transferred to Waiv, a spin-out of Owkin's diagnostics division, while Owkin's core operations refocus on the K Pro platform.