Valence Discovery Announces Multi-Target AI-Enabled Drug Design Collaboration with Servier

The collaboration will take advantage of Valence’s unique expertise in few-shot learning, generative chemistry, and multiparameter optimization to rapidly generate novel drug candidates that satisfy complex potency, selectivity, safety, and pharmacology criteria. Under the terms of the collaboration, Valence will receive an upfront payment and is eligible to receive success-based milestones on drug candidates derived from the collaboration.

“We chose to partner with Valence due to their depth of knowledge across all facets of deep learning, as well as their exceptional progress in developing methods suited for low data settings, a major limitation of competing technologies,” says Christophe Poitevin, Ph.D., Medicinal Chemistry Project Lead at Servier.

“The development of AI-based drug design is a major opportunity for optimizing both the timelines and quality of drug candidates. In the past decade, the number of key players in the AI drug discovery space dramatically increased, and the selection of strong partners to increase our expertise in this field will be key for the future,” says Françoise Gellibert, Ph.D., Head of Discovery Chemistry at Servier.

“We are thrilled to be working with the world-class team at Servier,” says Daniel Cohen, CEO of Valence. “By combining cutting-edge machine learning with thoughtful infrastructure for improved collaboration, we look forward to making rapid progress with Servier against highly challenging drug targets.”

About Valence’s AI-Enabled Drug Design Platform

The Valence platform expands upon academia-leading research done by the company’s founding team at Mila, the world’s largest deep learning research institute. In particular, Valence has pioneered the application of few-shot learning in drug design, allowing the company to unlock prediction tasks for which only small amounts of training data are available, including novel targets and complex ADME criteria, while also ensuring that AI-generated molecules are of high medicinal chemistry quality and readily synthesizable. In addition, Valence uses active learning and iterative optimization strategies to ensure that only the most information-rich compounds are selected for synthesis, enabling the design of compounds meeting the target potency, selectivity, and ADME criteria in fewer iterations, and with far less data, than otherwise possible.

About Valence Discovery

Valence is committed to unlocking the true potential of deep learning in drug design by unifying best-in-class deep learning technologies with intuitive infrastructure to make these technologies more broadly accessible to R&D organizations of all sizes. Valence’s AI-enabled drug design platform has been extensively validated and is currently being used to identify and design drug candidates in collaboration with industry-leading partners. The company is pioneering the application of few-shot learning in drug design and is developing and deploying novel machine learning methods for molecular property prediction, generative chemistry, and multiparameter optimization. Valence (formerly InVivo AI) was founded in 2018, is advised by deep learning pioneer, Dr. Yoshua Bengio, and is proudly headquartered in Montreal at Mila, the world’s largest deep learning research institute, with an office in Cambridge, Mass. To learn more, please visit www.valencediscovery.com.

About Servier

Servier is a global independent pharmaceutical group. Relying on a solid geographical presence and revenue of €4.7 billion in 2020 achieved in 150 countries, Servier employs 22,500 people worldwide. Committed to therapeutic progress to serve patient needs, Servier invests over 20% of its brand-name revenue in Research and Development every year and integrates the patient's voice at the heart of its activities, from research to support beyond the pill. Servier’s growth is based on a sustained commitment to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, oncology and immuno-inflammatory, and neuropsychiatric diseases. To promote access to healthcare for all, the Servier Group also offers a range of quality generic drugs covering most pathologies.

Servier Group’s partnering efforts in the US are bolstered by Servier BioInnovation (SBI), located in Kendall Square, MA. SBI’s mission includes identifying innovative early-stage R&D opportunities, establishing partnerships and expediting BD&L activities in the local innovation ecosystem. For more information, www.servier.com.

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