Hong Kong based Insilico Medicine has announced that it has entered into a research collaboration agreement with Japanese firm Astellas Pharma Inc. to utilize Insilico Medicine's novel generative artificial intelligence technology aimed at accelerating development of candidates against a conventionally challenging target family. This collaboration builds on AI platform developed by Insilico Medicine and will apply Astellas' expertise in drug discovery. 

"Astellas is at the forefront of innovation in drug discovery and is seen as a leader in developing and acquiring new emerging technology. This collaboration will exploit the capabilities of our entire generative chemistry platform which experienced exponential increases in performance and quality over the past few years. We are very happy to collaborate with some of the most intelligent and sophisticated scientists in the world on a very interesting target which, has no known examples to learn from, and our platform utilizing meta learning, zero-shot generative reinforcement learning, and genetic algorithms, holds a lot of promise," Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, founder, and CEO of Insilico Medicine.

Under the terms of the agreement, Insilico Medicine will receive an upfront payment and milestones. Insilico Medicine will closely collaborate with Astellas, which will synthesize, optimize and characterize the molecules generated using artificial intelligence.