The company creator General Inception (GI) has acquired Enable Medicine to pool its know-how regarding drug development and the biotech ecosystem with the latter’s biological data offerings.
A lot of biological data is fragmented and siloed away, making it difficult to harness for discovering new classes of drugs. To tackle this issue, Enable is building an atlas of human biology made up of billions of cells and thousands of patient data sets. The company helps users to deploy generative artificial intelligence (AI) to discover drug targets and diagnostics.
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Following the merger, GI and Enable are now looking to offer their joint project to healthcare providers and data repositories in partnership deals.
Collaboration to accelerate breakthroughs in healthcare
“Leveraging AI to help cure seemingly incurable diseases is possible, but only if we have the right data that can identify the correct biological targets in the first place,” said James Zou, an AI expert in life sciences and member of Enable’s scientific advisory board, in a public statement. “Organizing such data and finding such targets has historically been a real challenge.”
He added that the team-up with GI will ensure that Enable’s technology “can be put to use by many top researchers, working in a wide range of areas including cancer, autoimmune and inflammatory disease.”
GI and Enable worked in tandem to found the autoimmune and inflammatory disease specialist Ennovate Pharma in 2023. As a result, they have validated several drug targets that could lead to treatments for patients that cannot be helped with current approaches.
At the same time as its takeover of Enable, GI teamed up with the UK venture studio Deep Science Ventures (DSV) to launch a company developing treatments for tissue scarring known as fibrosis, which only has two treatments approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.
As part of the collaboration, GI and DSV, which deploys an AI co-pilot tool to narrow down the best solutions for techno-economic challenges, will identify an approach for treating fibrosis, recruit a founding team, and jointly fund and launch a new company to take on the development of the treatment.
AI-driven innovation fuels growth in life sciences
The growing adoption of AI in drug discovery and other fields of healthcare such as radiology is propelling the global market in this space, which is projected to skyrocket from $1.5 billion in 2022 to $15 billion by 2032.
At the same time, there is M&A appetite for data and AI providers in the life sciences, with EPAM Systems snapping up Odysseus Data Services in June. And the US AI and drug discovery giant Recursion took over its UK peer Exscientia for $688 million in August.
