UK drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is to collaborate with artificial intelligence (AI) company Exscientia. The partnership will see Exscientia combine its AI-enabled platform with GSK’s expertise to discover novel and selective small molecules for up to 10 disease-related targets. These will be nominated by GSK across multiple therapeutic areas.

The Dundee, Scotland-based AI group will apply both its ‘Big Data’ resources, which comprise medicinal chemistry and large-scale bio-assays among others, and its AI-driven algorithms to design novel molecules that fulfil the requirements of the lead and candidate criteria.

As part of the collaboration, Exscientia will be incentivized to reduce the number of compounds required for synthesis and assay. The company said this is in response to observations that early stages of drug discovery have not been positively impacted by technologies that have delivered significant efficiencies to other fields.

GSK will make research payments to Exscientia to undertake new discovery programs with nominated targets with the goal of delivering pre-clinical candidates. In addition, Exscientia will be eligible to receive near-term lead and preclinical candidate milestones, totalling up to £33 million if all 10 projects advance.

“Applying our approach to client discovery projects has already delivered candidate-quality molecules in roughly one-quarter of the time and at one-quarter of the cost of traditional approaches. Delivering efficiencies to drug discovery has the potential to revolutionize the way early projects are executed, enabling more dynamic target selections from the burgeoning set of opportunities,” commented Exscientia’s CEO Andrew Hopkins.

In separate news, GSK has chosen a third target in its oncology collaboration with Immunocore to discover multiple novel targets not addressable with antibody-based technologies. Under the deal, Immunocore will generate a novel ImmTAC molecule against the selected target that is relevant in multiple cancers.

Bent Jakobsen, chief scientific officer at Immunocore, said: “The initiation of this new program adds to a growing body of evidence that our ImmTAC technology has real potential to generate novel, potent drug candidates against disease targets which are difficult to address with other biologic platforms. ImmTAC molecules are relevant across a wide range of cancer types and have the ability to tackle solid ‘”cold,” low mutation rate tumors – the majority of tumors that are difficult for other immuno-oncology drugs to address.”

This is the third program to be initiated as part of the discovery collaboration with GSK announced in 2013. Immunocore is currently working on two other ImmTAC programs as part of this agreement. The lead program is on track for an investigational new drug this year with potential to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLS), bladder cancer, synovial sarcoma, melanoma and ovarian cancer.