Envisagenics, an Artificial Intelligence (“AI”)-driven biotechnology company that delivers therapies for RNA splicing diseases, today announced a research collaboration agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb. The multi-year collaboration will leverage Envisagenics’ SpliceCore AI platform to identify alternative splicing derived targets for therapeutic development to expand Bristol Myers Squibb’s vast oncology pipeline. Envisagenics will receive an upfront payment and milestone payments based on development, regulatory, and commercial achievements.
SpliceCore, a cloud-based, AI-powered platform, can identify disease-specific splicing-derived targets by using RNA-sequencing data. Envisagenics will integrate data from thousands of patients to identify mRNAs encoding for tumor-specific cell surface antigens, thereby fostering the discovery of novel targets to enable development of therapeutics.
“It is exciting to see how quickly significant scientific breakthroughs in the biopharma industry can be achieved with the assistance of AI,” said Maria Luisa Pineda, Ph.D., Envisagenics’ CEO and Co-founder. “Our SpliceCore platform, coupled with Bristol Myers Squibb’s expertise, has the potential to accelerate target identification, transform modern drug development, and improve patient outcomes.”
The SpliceCore platform applies an ensemble of proprietary algorithms to RNA-sequencing data, creating a sequence search space of approximately 7 million splicing events, thus maximizing the odds of drug target discovery. SpliceCore prioritizes drug targets based on their disease-specificity, biological roles, and druggability through a variety of drug modalities. Thanks to its scalable and cost-effective cloud architecture, the platform can process massive amounts of RNA-seq data efficiently and at high speed. SpliceCore helps to identify drug targets quickly and, in turn, predicts drug-responding alternative splicing events for therapeutic development.
Martin Akerman, Ph.D., Envisagenics’ CTO and Co-founder, added, “novel therapeutic targets are urgently needed for patients, and Envisagenics is thrilled to be collaborating with BMS as part of our quest for innovation.”