Chugai Pharmaceutical has teamed up with Gero, offering up to $250 million for the chance to develop antibodies against age-related disease targets identified by its partner's AI-driven platform.
Singapore-based Gero has used human data, physical models and machine learning to understand aging. Gero’s models are designed to predict human health and explain how they reach their conclusions. The approach has led to papers on topics such as how to find biomarkers of age and frailty and a deal with Pfizer to discover fibrotic disease targets.
Chugai, a Japanese company majority owned by Roche, has identified Gero’s platform as complementary to its own capabilities. The deal positions Gero to use its platform to find targets for age-related diseases. Chugai will use its antibody engineering technologies to create candidates that hit the targets.
“Our AI platform is built to identify therapeutic targets that drive multiple age-related diseases and potentially aging itself,” Gero CEO Peter Fedichev said in a statement. “In this collaboration, we aim to translate those insights into therapeutics that can help restore the lost function.”
The deal gives Chugai exclusive worldwide rights to antibodies for the identified targets. In return, the Japanese pharma has made an upfront payment of an undisclosed size and committed up to $250 million in development and sales milestones. Gero is also in line to receive royalties on product sales.
Chugai framed the deal as part of its push to become “the world’s top innovator, not just in Japan” by 2030. The company, which discovered Roche products including Actemra and Hemlibra, has turned to AI to help fulfil its ambition. Chugai teamed up with Japanese investor SoftBank in January to develop AI agents capable of autonomously executing clinical development tasks.
If the project is successful, the agents will support development of a pipeline that currently focuses on cancer, immunology, neurology, hematology and ophthalmology. Chugai also has programs in areas such as obesity that fall outside of its core therapeutic areas.