GSK Licenses NOETIK’s OCTO-Virtual Cell Foundation Models to Transform Cancer Therapeutics R&D
We are announcing a five-year foundation model licensing partnership with GSK including $50M in upfront and near-term capital, and annual model licensing fees, to transform cancer R&D.
We are announcing a five-year foundation model licensing agreement with GSK today.
This is a huge milestone for NOETIK, but it also represents a shift for the biopharma industry: the move from AI services collaborations to licensing of biological foundation models as AI infrastructure. This is among the first and largest transactions monetizing a biological foundation model as a scalable enterprise asset.
GSK is licensing our OCTO-VC virtual cell foundation models to work on non-small cell lung cancer and colorectal cancer. GSK's AI and therapeutics teams will also get access to one of the most extensive oncology multimodal spatial training sets in existence. They are committing $50 million in upfront payments and near-term milestones, along with an annual license fee to access these powerful capabilities.
The most important part of this is the potential impact these models will have on the development of new medicines for patients through integration into GSK’s drug discovery and development process.
Most drug discovery is still guesswork. Using self-supervised learning to train foundation models on one of the largest spatial biology datasets in oncology, we can interrogate cancer biology—from the level of the tissue to the genome—to simulate outcomes for therapeutics before they enter into the clinic. GSK now has access to these models to query tumor biology at a scale and resolution that wasn't possible before.
This partnership also defines a new asset class. Foundation models as scalable enterprise assets, and a growing impact for AI-guided discovery and development on new medicines.
It’s going to be an exciting year!
For another take on this deal and the shift toward licensing biological foundation models, we recommend reading Andy Dunn’s exclusive feature in Endpoints News.
Massive congrats on this partnership, truly groundbreaking stuff! The licensing model for bilogical foundation models is kinda like what happened with cloud infrastructure in the early 2010s. I worked on some early spatial data projects and the sheer compute needed to simulate tissue-level interactions was insane. What's interesting is how this creates a flywheel where pharma investments into these models generate more training data, which improves model performance for the next licensee.