Tokyo-based Chugai Pharmaceutical is joining with the AI-driven biotech Gero, in a research collaboration on age-related diseases potentially worth more than $1 billion.

The collaboration will see Chugai, majority owned by Roche, creating novel antibody drug candidates using its in-house engineering capabilities. The targets sought by those antibodies will be discovered using Gero’s AI target discovery platform, which serves as predictive models of human health trained on longitudinal medical records. Chugai will get exclusive worldwide rights to any drug candidates made in the collaboration.

Under terms of the deal, Chugai will make an undisclosed upfront payment and put up approximately $250 million if certain unannounced development or sales milestones are reached. If Chugai successfully launches a product, the company will pay Gero additional royalties, which could push the total value of the deal to above $1 billion, according to an email sent to BioSpace from a Chugai representative.

Though the companies did not announce any specific indications they will be targeting in the collaboration, Singapore-based Gero’s stated cause is to eliminate the “root causes of age-related diseases.”

“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. This partnership with Chugai is an important step toward achieving Gero’s mission: to meaningfully target the biological processes of human aging.”

Gero previously inked a deal with Pfizer in January 2023 to apply its AI technology platform to discover targets in fibrotic diseases. Financial terms of that deal were not disclosed, only that Gero would receive an upfront payment and be eligible to receive discovery milestone payments. Gero appears to still be in its early stages, having raised a $6 million series A round in 2023. The company does not have a published drug pipeline on its website.

Chugai, for its part, has partnered with AI companies since late last decade, making it an early entrant into the biopharma-AI space. In 2018 Chugai linked up with the deep learning company Preferred Networks, paying the latter about $5 million (¥‎700 million) for access to its platform. More recently, Chugai partnered with SoftBank in January to use generative AI to accelerate drug development, with the aim of streamlining personnel and costs associated with clinical trials.

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