Accenture Collaborates with 1910 Genetics to Help Biopharma Companies Transform Drug Discovery with AI

By: 1910 Genetics via Business Wire

October 31, 2024 at 08:00 AM EDT

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has invested, through Accenture Ventures, in 1910 Genetics (or “1910”), a biotechnology company advancing small and large molecule drug discovery with a multimodal AI platform powered by laboratory automation. As part of this investment, Accenture and 1910 will collaborate to combine tailored solutions and scalable infrastructure to help clients in the biopharma industry accelerate drug target identification, reduce costs, and deliver better, more affordable therapies to patients.

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1910’s proprietary Input-Transform-Output (ITO™) platform is a scalable, end-to-end AI solution designed to deliver better drug candidates with applications across all modalities and therapeutic areas. It is a multi-AI agent system comprising hundreds of models that leverages federated learning alongside three proprietary data streams – computational data, wet lab ground truth biological data and wet lab proxy biological data. The platform helps enable drug discovery teams to achieve high precision target identification, optimize molecule design, and conduct advanced simulation throughout the R&D process. By facilitating data-driven decision making, it can increase the probability of clinical success, while shortening experimental iteration cycles and reducing the overall cost of drug development.

“Taking an AI-driven approach is essential in order to reinvent the drug discovery and development process,” said Tom Lounibos, global lead of Accenture Ventures. “Collaborating with 1910 Genetics allows us to integrate our AI expertise with their innovative technology and deliver solutions that can transform drug discovery and improve patient outcomes.”

Accenture’s expertise in scaling AI solutions across enterprises can help biopharma companies smoothly integrate 1910’s AI platform into their existing pipelines. Together, Accenture and 1910 will combine their experience and expertise to help drive breakthroughs in therapeutic development, improve the efficiency of drug discovery, and drive innovation for biopharma companies.

Petra Jantzer, PhD, a senior managing director and global lead of Life Sciences at Accenture, added, “We look forward to joining up our diverse experience in implementing generative AI projects across enterprises and deep expertise in the life sciences sector with 1910 Genetics and its holistic, comprehensive AI platform. Our investment and collaboration support our vision for our biopharma clients to implement tech-enabled drug discovery, automating processes, breaking down silos and increasing productivity.”

“In our discussions with biopharma companies, the desire for AI transformation of their traditional R&D processes is evident,” said Jen Nwankwo, PhD, founder and CEO of 1910 Genetics. “It’s also clear that 1910’s end-to-end AI platform – from in silico to the wet lab and back – addresses the challenges that biopharma companies face with point solutions. By collaborating with Accenture, we aim to bring 1910’s AI platform to biopharma companies as an enterprise-wide horizontal infrastructure that breaks down barriers in data, model, and computing power to accelerate the discovery and development of both small and large molecule therapeutics across all therapeutic areas.”

In conjunction with this announcement, Dr. Petra Jantzer and Tom Lounibos will join the Business Advisory Board of 1910, and Dr. Kailash Swarna, a managing director in Life Sciences at Accenture, and Dr. Cecil Lynch, Biomedical Informatics lead at Accenture, will join the Technology Advisory Board of 1910.

1910 will also join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program for startup companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies.

Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 774,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

About 1910 Genetics

1910 Genetics is the only biotechnology company advancing small and large molecule drug discovery with a multimodal AI platform powered by laboratory automation. We integrate AI that leverages federated learning alongside three proprietary data streams – computational data, wet lab proxy biological data, and wet lab ground truth biological data – to deliver novel drug candidates and software solutions to leading biopharma and tech partners, and advance our internal pipeline for neurological, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. We recently established a commercial partnership with Microsoft to bring our ITO™ platform to biopharma companies at scale.

1910 was launched in 2021 with a combined seed and Series A funding of $26.1M from M12-Microsoft’s Venture Fund, Playground Global, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, FoundersX Ventures, and other leading investors. We have since established our HQ and lab facilities in Boston’s Seaport District and continue to hire a world-class team. To learn more, visit www.1910genetics.com.