Boehringer Ingelheim and IBM Partner To Advance Generative AI

Boehringer Ingelheim and IBM established a collaboration in which Boehringer would leverage IBM's foundation model technology to uncover unique candidate antibodies for the development of effective medicines.

“We are very excited to collaborate with the research team at IBM, who share our vision of making in silico biologic drug discovery a reality,” said Andrew Nixon, global head of biotherapeutics discovery at Boehringer Ingelheim. “I am confident that by joining forces with IBM scientists we will develop an unprecedented platform for accelerated antibody discovery which will enable Boehringer to develop and deliver new treatments for patients with high unmet need.”

Boehringer will be using an IBM-developed, pre-trained AI model that will be further fine-tuned on additional Boehringer proprietary data. “IBM has been at the forefront of creating generative AI models that extend AI’s impact beyond the domain of language” said Alessandro Curioni, vice president accelerated discovery, IBM Research. “We are thrilled to now bring IBM’s multimodal foundation model technologies to Boehringer, a leader in the development and manufacturing of antibody-based therapies, to help accelerate the pace at which Boehringer can create new therapeutics.”

Therapeutic antibodies are central in the treatment of many diseases, including cancer, autoimmune and infectious diseases. Despite major technological advances, the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies covering diverse epitopes remains a highly complex and time-consuming process, as per pharmabiz.

Together, Boehringer and IBM researchers will aim to accelerate the antibody discovery process through in-silico methods.  The sequence, structure and molecular profile information of disease-relevant targets as well as success criteria for therapeutically relevant antibody molecules, like affinity, specificity and developability will form the basis for the in-silico generation of new human antibody sequences.