Owkin to build AI agents for Sanofi in expanded $90M deal

Owkin and Sanofi are deepening a partnership that began with €90 million in 2021, now adding purpose-built AI agents and a five-year license for Owkin's K Pro platform to accelerate drug development.

Sanofi will deploy AI agents purpose-built by Owkin across its drug research and development workflow, backed by a five-year license for K Pro, Owkin's AI Scientist platform that combines multimodal patient data with biological AI systems.

"Building on our collaboration with Sanofi, this marks a shift toward truly embedded AI," said Thomas Clozel, CEO and co-founder of Owkin. "Sanofi can further harness agentic systems within their own workflows, unlocking the full value of their data."

The companies have worked together since 2021 through a €90 million strategic partnership focused on oncology target identification and patient subgrouping, later expanded to include drug positioning for Sanofi's immunology pipeline. Under the new agreement, Owkin will lead end-to-end development of AI-driven biopharma agents that autonomously perform complex research tasks, deployed through K Pro to complement Sanofi's existing agentic AI capabilities.

Sanofi shares rose 1.3% to $44.96 in premarket trading. The deal signals growing institutional commitment to AI in drug discovery, following Bristol-Myers Squibb's May agreement with Anthropic to deploy AI across its operations and Gilead Sciences' expanded partnership with Tempus AI in April.

K Pro combines multimodal patient data — including genomics, pathology, and clinical records — with specialized biological AI systems to support each stage of the pharmaceutical value chain, from early discovery through clinical development. Owkin said the platform also provides competitive intelligence, enabling faster and more precise decisions.

The collaboration is part of Owkin's broader push toward what it calls Biological Artificial Superintelligence, a technology the company believes will allow the pharmaceutical industry to address and ultimately automate some of the most complex challenges in research and development. Owkin has built its platform on a decade of experience working with pharmaceutical partners and what it describes as an unrivaled multimodal patient data network.

For Sanofi, the deal represents a deepening bet on agentic AI as a tool to compress drug development timelines. Emmanuel Frenehard, Sanofi's chief digital officer, said the purpose-built agentic systems aim to "empower our teams to operate with greater speed, depth, and confidence."

The competitive landscape is shifting rapidly. Bristol-Myers Squibb's partnership with Anthropic, announced in May, aims to connect more than 30,000 employees with critical institutional knowledge through advanced AI. Gilead's expanded collaboration with Tempus AI, announced in April, focuses on enhancing oncology research and development through AI-driven data analysis.

Sanofi trades at roughly 22x forward earnings. The company has not disclosed the financial terms of the expanded Owkin collaboration beyond the existing €90 million partnership framework.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.