Exscientia

UK-based Exscientia is a full-stack AI drug discovery firm with discovery-to-clinical capabilities. The company uses its proprietary Centaur Chemist technology to assess disease targets specified by its clients and to prioritize potential disease targets for its own pipeline.

It follows the Bispecific (dual-target) novel and highly complex approach that attempts to identify two simultaneous and distinct targets that perfectly bind with a drug compound, as opposed to identifying a single target. This can save considerable costs as a single drug can deliver the same efficacy as two different drugs. The company’s AI algorithms are disease-agnostic, which means the platform can be applied to any disease targets across a wider range of disease types, such as oncology, cardiovascular, and rare diseases. The company also claims to be the first to apply AI to small molecule drug discovery and design.

In a landmark development, Exscientia advanced the first fully AI-developed drug into human clinical trials, in partnership with Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma (SDP) in January 2020. The drug discovery and preclinical research were completed in less than 12 months, a fraction of the five-year average for the same process using conventional research techniques. As of May 2024, the company had four drug candidates in its pipeline.

In July 2024 , the company penned a licensing agreement with AI-powered biopharmaceutical company GT Apeiron for its oral CDK7 inhibitor program, GTAEXS617 ('617). This oral CDK7 inhibitor, was evaluated in the ELUCIDATE clinical trial for its impact on advanced solid tumors.

Key customers and partnerships

The company has formed several partnership projects that include several large pharmaceutical players such as Bayer (August 2022), Sanofi (January 2022), Bristol-Myers Squibb (May 2021), Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma (January 2020), GT Apeiron Therapeutics (June 2019), Celgene (March 2019), Roche (January 2019), GSK (July 2017), and Charité (March 2023). The company also added Big Pharma company Merck to its partner network in September 2023 via a strategic partnership that aimed to identify and develop new compounds against three targets. 

The company has also received two grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF): USD 4.2 million in December 2020 for malaria tuberculosis and non-hormonal contraception treatments, and USD 1.5 million in July 2021 to develop therapies for Covid-19. It also entered a USD 70 million partnership with BMGF in September 2021 to develop therapies for viral diseases. In addition, it has several co-development projects with Evotec, Apeiron, and Rallibio.