AMD is giving $20 million to Absci, an AI drug company. Absci will use AMD chips and software.
With the news of a new relationship and investment in startup Absci Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is going up against its bigger rival Nvidia Corp. in drug discovery powered by AI.
An early trade on Wednesday saw Absci’s stock (ABSI) rise more than 30%. This was after the company announced that it had gotten a $20 million investment from new partner AMD to move its pipeline forward.
Based in Vancouver, Wash. Absci said that the investment is set up as a PIPE deal, which stands for “private investment in public equity.”
Using its chips and software, AMD will help Absci make better biologics for patients. This will lower the cost of infrastructure and speed up the innovation cycle.
It is AMD’s first investment in healthcare, a field that is already being eyed by Nvidia, the market leader. (NVDA)
With the help of AMD’s high-performance computing, we can speed up the development of next-generation antibody therapeutics. “We are excited about the potential for this partnership to accelerate the future of drug discovery,” Absci CEO Sean McClain said in prepared comments.
AI has a lot of potential for finding new drugs because models trained on huge datasets can do many jobs quickly. Last year, Nvidia said it was putting more effort into using AI to find new drugs by expanding its partnerships with Amgen Inc. (AMGN) and Recursion Pharmaceuticals Inc. (RXRX).
At an event in January, Amgen’s division deCODE Genetics said it was building an Nvidia supercomputer to make “foundation models” for genomics.
BioNeMo is Nvidia’s own generative AI tool for drug discovery, and Recursion has adopted it. Nvidia said that the methods used to run the platform help scientists use generative AI to do fewer tests or even do them instead.
Absci says that its scalable wet lab technologies and AI can shorten the time it takes to get a drug to the clinic and raise the chances of it working by improving many aspects of the drug at the same time that are important for both research and therapeutic benefit.
“With the data to train, the AI to create, and the wet lab to validate, we can screen billions of cells per week, allowing us to go from AI-designed candidates to wet lab-validated candidates in as little as six weeks,” the business says on its site.
Also on Wednesday, Novo Nordisk, a Danish company that makes weight-loss drugs, said it was widening a deal with Valo Health, a privately held company that makes AI drugs. The deal was worth up to $2.7 billion at first, but now it’s worth up to $4.6 billion.
Novo Nordisk said that the new project will include a payment of up to $190 million in the near future.
The businesses say they will work together to find and create solutions for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.
Usually, finding new drugs takes a long time and costs a lot of money. About 90% of drug candidates that make it to the clinical testing stage fail. For successful drugs, the route to the U.S. market usually takes 10 to 15 years and costs about $2.5 billion. This makes a faster AI-driven route appealing.
In the past year, Absci’s stock has gone down 3%, while the S&P 500 SPX has gone up 24%.
