A Dundee life sciences firm has received a $100 million (£73.6m) cash payment in a major deal that has the potential to be worth billions.
Exscientia uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help design drugs which can dramatically reduce the time taken to develop medicines.
The company was founded at Dundee University a decade ago. It retains a base in the city as well as offices around the world.
It has won several multi-million-pound deals and last year floated on the Nasdaq stock exchange in America.
What is the new Exscientia deal?
Exscientia’s new contract is a research collaboration with pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
It will receive an upfront cash payment of $100m from Sanofi.
But, depending on the project’s success, future milestone payments could reach up to $5.2 billion.
Andrew Hopkins, founder of Exscientia, said: “It is immensely exciting to collaborate with Sanofi with our goal of realising the full potential of AI to deliver the next generation of cancer and immunology medicines.
“Our AI-driven platform can be leveraged across drug discovery, translational research and development.
“Applications range from improving the precision medicine and quality of drug candidates to enriching for patient selection in clinical trials.
“Our expanded collaboration with Sanofi will utilise the breadth of our platform to test AI-designed drug candidates against patient tissue models, potentially providing far better accuracy than conventional approaches such as mouse models.
“When you consider the change this represents – testing candidates against actual human tissue years before a clinical trial – it’s transformative.”
Exscientia formed in coffee shop
Sanofi is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on human health.
It aims to prevent illness with vaccines, provide innovative treatments to fight pain and ease suffering.
Exscientia is one of Dundee’s life sciences success stories.
It continues to have 25 staff at the Dundee One building at City Quay.
As well as its Oxford headquarters, Exscientia has offices in Vienna, Miami and Osaka.
Mr Hopkins’ stake in the business is worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
When he gave a ‘masterclass’ presentation at Dundee University just over two years ago, Mr Hopkins urged entrepreneurs to “think globally”.
He said Exscientia was formed by three people with a credit card in a coffee shop.
