Biotech Boost: AstraZeneca & Algen’s $555M AI Drug Discovery Deal & Astex, BMS & Takeda Pool Data

From September 16 to 18, 2025, United States President Donald Trump made a state visit to the United Kingdom with the goal of fostering improved economic growth between the two countries through the Tech Prosperity Deal.

It even attracted massive investments from U.S.-based companies including Google pouring in $6.8 billion over the next two years, Microsoft committing $30 billion in AI infrastructure and current operations from 2025 through 2028, NVIDIA planning a deployment of 120,000 GPUs (including up to 60,000 Grace Blackwell Ultra chips with Nscale), CoreWeave’s $2 billion to build energy-efficient data centers, and Salesforce adding $6 billion through 2030.

Overall, the visit generated around $41.5 billion in investments aimed at advancing AI infrastructure and cutting-edge technologies, from data centers to computer chips.

It did not stop here.

The partnership will also see the two countries combine resources and expertise to push emerging technologies to bring millions of patients life-saving treatments faster by developing revolutionary quantum computers, artificial intelligence (AI) in targeted treatments and drug discovery, and more avenues.

“This partnership will deliver good jobs, life-saving treatments and faster medical breakthroughs for the British people,” said Liz Kendall, the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. “Our world-leading tech companies and scientists will be working together to transform lives across Britain.”

AI adoption in the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology sectors has been rampant over the past few years as generative AI (GenAI) has become a prominent part of drug discovery, drug development, and targeted treatments, in addition to early disease detection and medical diagnostics.

This revolutionary technology is spurring a wide range of partnerships and deals in the healthcare sector.
 

Algen’s $555 Million AI-Powered Drug Discovery Deal With AstraZeneca

San Francisco-based biotechnology firm Algen Biotechnologies announced a partnership with AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, in a deal valued at up to $555 million.

The amount includes an upfront payment, as well as additional payments upon the achievement of specific development, regulatory and commercial milestones.

AstraZeneca will receive exclusive rights to develop and sell a defined set of therapies that emerge from Algen’s AlgenBrain platform that will be used to drive preclinical drug discovery of new therapeutic targets in immunology, through the multi-target deal.

AlgenBrain combines AI and CRISPR gene modulation to map how genes drive disease and develop next-generation therapies by analyzing billions of RNA changes in human cells and identifying target areas that can reverse disease processes.

“AlgenBrain is designed to uncover the most actionable targets by integrating experimental biology with AI in a continuous learning loop,” said Christine Du, CBO and Co-Founder, Algen. “By grounding discovery in human biology and mapping gene function to disease outcomes, we believe the AlgenBrain platform can help drive a new era of predictive, precision drug discovery across a wide range of therapeutic areas.”

“Together with AstraZeneca’s deep expertise in translational science and clinical development, we aim to uncover new biological insights to accelerate the development of novel therapies alone or in combination to transform patient outcomes,” said Chun-Hao Huang, Ph.D., CEO & Co-Founder, Algen.

“We are using AI and Machine Learning to enhance the discovery of new targets, which we believe will help to create more effective medicines,” said Jim Weatherall, Ph.D., Chief Data Scientist, Biopharmaceuticals R&D AstraZeneca. “Algen’s platform offers a powerful approach to achieving this.”

 

Astex, BMS, And Takeda Join AbbVie And Johnson & Johnson In AISB Data Pool Program

Pharmaceutical companies Astex Pharmaceuticals, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals are joining founding members AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson in the Federated OpenFold3 Initiative, according to Apheris, a company that delivers enterprise-grade AI applications enabling collaborative capabilities for drug discovery.

AISB is an industry-led network that looks to advance AI in drug discovery.

The Federated OpenFold3 initiative, which is conducted in collaboration with the AlQuraishi Lab at Columbia University, aims to build an AI model called OpenFold3 that can offer improved accuracy in predicting protein–ligand interactions, a critical step in small molecule drug discovery.

Participating firms pool their structurally derived data to build a bigger, more robust, and diverse data set that can foster faster drug discovery beyond what one company can do. Moreover, the data enabled better fine-tuning of the model.

In this case, each partner brings data from several thousand experimentally determined protein–small molecule structures to create one of the most diverse datasets assembled for model training in drug discovery.

All of this is powered by Apheris’ federated computing platform, which allows partners to collaborate without moving or exposing sensitive data.

“By contributing data from our small molecule–protein structures to a federated effort, we can help ensure models like OpenFold3 better reflect the challenges medicinal chemists face every day, while keeping proprietary science protected,” said Paul Mortenson, Senior Director, Computational Chemistry and Informatics, Astex.

“Through this federated learning initiative, we’re bringing together diverse structural datasets from multiple pharmaceutical companies to advance predictive models for small molecule discovery in ways no single organization could achieve alone,” said Payal Sheth, VP, Discovery Biotherapeutics & Lead Discovery and Optimization, Bristol Myers Squibb.

“The Federated OpenFold3 Initiative is a powerful example of how pharmaceutical companies can come together to develop AI tools that improve the development of novel therapies for patients,” said Hans Bitter, Head of Computational Science and Data Strategy at Takeda.

Do you think the partnership between Algen and AstraZeneca and the data pool program that Astex, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Takeda are joining will help them lead in the biotechnology sector?

Let us know in the comments below!