Terray is ending the year on a high. Just two short months ago the biotech came out with a healthy $120 million series B raise for its artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery work, and now it’s heading into the holidays with a new research pact with Gilead.
Details are thin on the ground, but we know Gilead is tapping into Terray’s so-called tNova platform, the startup’s generative AI.
This platform is designed to improve the speed, cost and success rate of drug development. So far, tNova has helped Terray measure more than 5 billion target-ligand interactions over the last three years, a figure the biotech believes is about 50 times larger than all publicly available chemistry data.
The promise of the approach was enough for that series B back in mid-October (and a $60 million raise in 2022), and now Gilead wants in, signing up to tap the tNova platform to “discover and develop small molecule compounds against a set of targets selected by Gilead,” according to a Dec. 17 press release.
Neither company was forthcoming on financial details or targets, with Gilead simply saying that—should it tap its option to exclusively license the compounds—it “will be responsible for further development and commercialization activities for products resulting from the collaboration.”
Terray gets an upfront payment and is in line for biobucks and sales milestones, though figures for these were not made public.
Gilead joins Bristol Myers Squibb and Alphabet subsidiary Calico in working with the startup.
“Next-generation, AI-driven platforms using custom-generated large, relevant data sets will serve as important tools in our efforts to shape the future of drug discovery in our ongoing pursuit of innovative treatments across our therapeutic areas of focus,” Flavius Martin, M.D., Executive Vice President, Research, Gilead, said in the release.
“We are excited to collaborate with Terray and explore how their integrated discovery platform will complement our own internal research capabilities and expertise.”
This comes after a bumpy year for Gilead’s research pacts. It’s been forced to give up on several projects in 2024, including in early MASH development and, more painfully, on the anti-CD47 monoclonal antibody magrolimab, which it bought in a $4.9 billion deal in 2020, leaving a major financial hole.
Only last month, the company announced it was culling 72 workers in Seattle while also outlining plans to shutter an R&D support site.