U.S.-based biotech firm Nabla Bio has announced a second major partnership with Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical, deepening their collaboration in AI-driven drug discovery. The multi-year agreement, following an initial 2022 alliance, grants Nabla double-digit million-dollar upfront payments and potential success-based rewards exceeding $1 billion.
The deal centers on Nabla’s Joint Atomic Model (JAM), an AI platform that designs protein-based therapeutics for Takeda’s early-stage pipeline. The collaboration will prioritize multi-specific drugs and other custom biologics aimed at hard-to-treat conditions. “We are working on Takeda’s most pressing discovery problems and using JAM to help unlock those,” said CEO Surge Biswas, comparing the system to ChatGPT but for molecules — generating antibodies from scratch in weeks.
Takeda’s shift aligns with a broader pharma industry trend toward AI-enabled R&D, after recently stepping away from cell therapy research to focus on faster, scalable modalities. Earlier this month, Takeda joined a consortium with Bristol Myers Squibb to train AI models using shared data.
Nabla expects its first AI-designed molecules to reach human trials within the next two years, reflecting growing confidence in AI’s potential to reduce drug development costs and timelines.
