Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk and US technology company Valo Health announced on January 8 an expansion of their 2023 agreement to discover and develop treatments for obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The collaboration leverages Valo’s human dataset and AI-powered computational capabilities.
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Initial Agreement
Novo and Valo initially partnered in September 2023 in an agreement to develop up to 11 drugs, primarily focused on cardiovascular disease. Under this agreement, Valo was eligible to receive up to USD 2.7 billion in milestone payments, in addition to R&D funding and potential royalty payments.
Expanded Collaboration Details
The expanded agreement now includes an upfront payment of USD 190 million to Valo, along with equity investments and near-term milestones. Valo is eligible to receive up to USD 4.6 billion in total milestone payments, plus R&D funding and royalties. The scope of the partnership has grown to include up to 20 drug programs, an increase of 9 new programs.
Valo’s AI and Novo’s Expertise
Novo Nordisk will collaborate with Valo to develop these treatments for obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. The partnership will continue to utilise Valo’s Opal Computational Platform and AI-driven insights, in combination with Novo Nordisk’s expertise in human data, genetics, and cardiometabolic diseases.
“We have already begun to realize the potential of combining the capabilities of Valo and Novo Nordisk to advance multiple AI-powered, human-centric programmes, and we believe this partnership will help Novo Nordisk fulfil our ambition to expand the number of new drug programmes we bring to the clinic,” said Marcus Schindler, Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Novo Nordisk.
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Future Directions and Strategic Goals
According to an official release, “The collaboration has already led to the identification of several novel targets that may form the basis of differentiated cardiometabolic drug programmes, and the companies are actively working on multiple small molecule preclinical drug discovery programmes.”
“This level of investment is a testament to our close partnership in deploying human-centric artificial intelligence to rapidly discover and develop novel cardiovascular and metabolic disease therapeutics,” said Brian Alexander, CEO of Valo Health and CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering. “The partnership fully leverages the Opal Computational Platform by seeking to identify novel therapeutic targets in large real-world patient datasets, validate those targets using human preclinical models, and develop therapeutics against those targets with human-centric AI small molecule design.”
Novo Nordisk and Valo plan to continue working closely together to derive novel insights from human genetic and longitudinal patient data at the intersection of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
