Sanofi invests $180 million equity in AI company Owkin

French pharma major Sanofi (Euronext: SAN) today announced an equity investment of $180 million and a new strategic collaboration with Owkin comprised of discovery and development programs in four exclusive types of cancer, with a total payment of $90 million for three years plus additional research milestone-based payments.

Owkin, an artificial intelligence (AI) and precision medicine company, builds best-in-class predictive biomedical AI models and robust data sets. With the ambition to optimize clinical trial design and detect predictive biomarkers for diseases and treatment outcomes, this collaboration will support Sanofi’s growing oncology portfolio in core areas such as lung cancer, breast cancer and multiple myeloma.

To accelerate medical research with AI in a privacy-preserving way, Owkin has assembled a global research network powered by federated learning, which allows data scientists to securely connect to decentralized, multi-party data sets and train AI models without having to pool data. This approach will complement Sanofi’s emerging strength in oncology, as the company’s scientists apply cutting-edge technology platforms to design potentially life-transforming medicines for cancer patients worldwide.