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CRL teams with Valo in latest AI-focused discovery deal

Posted by on 25 January 2022
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Charles River Laboratories has teamed with artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Valo Health to bolster its drug discovery services business.

The deal – financial terms of which were not disclosed – will combine Valo’s Opal Computational Platform with Charles River’s drug discovery and development capabilities to create an “AI-enabled drug discovery and development platform.”

Charles River will use Valo’s technology to find identify small molecule compounds with the potential to be turned into medicines. The CRO (Contract Research Organization) – which has exclusive rights to the platform – will launch the AI discovery service in the first half of the year.

The deal is part of an effort to advance Charles River’s discovery offering according to – Birgit Girshick, Corporate Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.

“Our collaboration with Valo is another step we’re taking toward accelerating drug discovery and development. By leveraging disruptive, AI-powered tools like Opal, we can support our clients in more quickly progressing their discoveries to the clinic.”

The accord follows just over a year after the CRO partnered with Valence Discovery, a developer of AI technology based at Mila, the research center established by Université de Montréal and McGill University in Montreal.

The Valence deal, like the new Valo agreement, was also focused on the use of AI for the discovery of novel small molecule drug candidates.

Valence’s technology differs in that it is used to predict the molecular properties of candidate compounds.

Discovery division

Charles River will publish its full financial results for 2021 next month, however, the CRO has reported increased demand for discovery services.

According to the firm’s Q3 results revenue generated by its discovery and safety assessment division increased 15.3% to $531.8 million in the three months the end of September.

At the time, CEO James Foster confirmed that AI would be key to the growth of Charles River’s discovery business, telling analysts: “We're going to continue to have to invest in technology across the portfolio, particularly in areas like AI and machine learning and next-generation sequencing and certain aspects of pathology and antibody discovery.

And AI is a bit of a wildcard. There are so many shots on goal that we could take and so much impact that this could have on the portfolio. But it's still relatively early days. So I think that we will have meaningful investments, particularly in AI and machine learning. I do think they can be beneficial to the whole portfolio.”

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