STAT+: Alnylam to partner with Inceptive Nucleics for AI foundation models for RNAi therapeutics
Article excerpt
Alnylam, a leader in RNA interference therapeutics, is partnering with Inceptive Nucleics in a three-year deal valued at up to $2 billion to develop AI foundation models for designing better RNAi drugs. The deal includes $30 million upfront in cash and equity stakes in the startup. The partnership aims to leverage machine learning to improve how Alnylam discovers and develops its RNA-targeting treatments, a technology that silences disease-causing genes. This marks a significant bet by a major biotech on AI-driven drug design for a specialized therapeutic category.
Jakob Uszkoreit went from inventing the “T” in ChatGPT to putting the “AI” in Alnylam’s RNAi therapeutics.
After over a dozen years at Google, where he’d co-authored the seminal “Attention is all you need” paper that laid the foundations for artificial intelligence models like GPT, Uszkoreit in 2021 left a job at Google Brain to start Inceptive Nucleics. The company is building “AI foundation models of life”, models that will hopefully learn so much about how biology operates that they will be reusable across many different tasks without having to be trained specifically to do them.
On Wednesday, Alnylam and Inceptive announced a new, three-year strategic collaboration worth up to $2 billion, with $30 million up front in cash and equity in the startup. The additional payments will be predicated on the co-discovered drugs achieving preclinical, regulatory, and commercial sales milestones. In 2025, Alnylam’s total revenues were $3.7 billion.
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