On June 8, Owkin, a French-American start-up specializing in AI and federated learning applied to medical research, announced that it had entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration with pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb to apply its AI capabilities to clinical trial optimization. The collaboration will initially focus on accelerating the time-to-market for cardiovascular drugs, but may be extended to other therapeutic areas.

Owkin, based in the United States but with the majority of its team based in Paris, was co-founded in 2016 by Thomas Clozel, a clinical researcher and former assistant professor in clinical hematology, and Gilles Wainrib, a doctor in AI applied to biology.

To enable medical research to scale up through the use of artificial intelligence while maintaining privacy, Owkin has built a global research network based on federated learning. The network enables secure connection to decentralized multi-party datasets and the creation of artificial intelligence models without data pooling, thus solving the problem of patient privacy and data protection.

Thomas Clozel, CEO of Owkin said:

“Owkin’s mission is to improve patients’ lives and use its platform to discover and develop the right treatment for each patient. We believe that the future of precision medicine lies in technologies that identify and analyze information from the vast amounts of patient data held by hospitals and research centers, securely and without compromising their privacy.”

As a reminder, last November, Owkin partnered with Sanofi to fight lung cancer, breast cancer and multiple myeloma, with the latter investing 80 million for upfront payment for clinical trials using its technology and the Series B-1 equity investment led by Bristol Myers Squibb. The startup may subsequently receive more than $100 million in additional funding upon the achievement of clinical trial milestones. Owkin said the equity investment will be used to support its ambitious strategy of generating patient data across multiple therapeutic areas, with a focus on rich, multi-modal biological data and using the most advanced single-cell spatial omics technologies. Gilles Wainrib, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Owkin, concludes:

“Our collaboration will use state-of-the-art machine learning methods to ensure that patients receive the latest treatments as quickly and safely as possible. We are excited to begin this collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb, a global leader in the cardiovascular field, which has strong development plans that could change the lives of millions of patients.”

Translated from Owkin annonce une collaboration stratégique pluri-annuelle avec Bristol Myers Squibb