How Teva is helping Israel’s AION Labs to transform the way big pharma works

AION Labs: the story so far

• AION Labs was established in 2021, a revolutionary healthcare collaboration between pharmacy giants Teva, AstraZeneca, Merck and Pfizer, venture capital firm Israel Biotech Fund, strategic partners Amazon Web Services and Amiti Ventures and German independent research institute BioMed X with the support of the Israel Innovation Authority
• Since launch, nine pharma start-ups have been created; eight are still operational and two to four are being created every year
• AION Labs is driving a “requirement-first” mentality, supporting start-up innovators to work on groundbreaking projects that are serving unmet needs in healthcare
• Start-up case study: DenovAI is developing an AI-physics-led platform to discover new antibodies and proteins to create more effective drugs for undertreated conditions, such as cancer and neurodegenerative illnesses
• Start-up case study: Cellyrix is leveraging advanced computational analysis of transcriptional data to unlock insights into intra-tumor diversity and ultimately develop new treatments
• AION Labs is strategically placed to help answer some of the immense challenges facing global healthcare today – affordability, access and how to bring breakthrough therapeutics to patients

Established in 2021 and working with some of the leading scientific minds in the world, AION Labs aims to revolutionize the world of healthcare by bringing pharma companies, scientists, academics, technology leaders and investors together to transform drug discovery and development.

Whether it's delivering insights into how diseases work or discovering, developing and bringing new drugs to market, the aim of AION Labs and its partners is to harness the capability of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to change the ways we innovate groundbreaking new medicines and bring hope to patients who currently suffer with untreated or undertreated conditions.

Currently it can take up to 15 years and billions of dollars of investment to bring a new drug to market. Optimizing the process using AI technology could be a game changer in the industry. 

“"Our mission since the start has been to help empower scientists by accelerating the discovery of new treatments and developing them in a faster and much more precise manner with less failure rate,” says Mati Gill, CEO AION Labs. “Since launch we’ve established nine start-ups, with eight still operational, creating two to four every year. It’s a strong track record. And we’ve made important learnings, including in our ideation processes, with how we define big industry-wide problem statements, establishing an open-innovation track for great ideas from academia and the hi-tech ecosystem and the need for multidisciplinary teams from day one.”

How does it work?

Breaking with the traditional industrial model where companies compete and work in secret, AION Labs brings together pharmacy giants Teva, AstraZeneca, Merck and Pfizer, backed by venture capital firm Israel Biotech Fund, strategic partners Amazon Web Services, Amiti Ventures and German independent research institute BioMed X, with the support of the Israeli government through the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA).

New startups are established based on innovative research already being carried out in science and technology communities or by flagging key challenges facing the healthcare sector that the communities are invited to solve. Funded by AION Labs for the first two years, further funding may be available as necessary.

Shiri Netser, Teva’s Senior Director of Corporate Development, was one of the founders of the AION Labs consortium and explains that this is a first-of-its-kind collaboration.

“It’s a unique situation for four major pharma companies to form a partnership and create this sort of synergy. We are in this together, we are not competing, we are all benefitting from our joint capabilities and coming together to try to create solutions that will support the entire healthcare community.”

Bridging the gap between academia and industry

Dr Christian Tidona, founder and Managing Director of the BioMed X Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, explains the importance of bridging the gap between academia and industry to provide better practical solutions for global healthcare.

“There’s a lot of research going on worldwide within academia but not much of what is produced ends up in the pharma industry as something that ultimately will help patients. This is generally because academic science is driven by curiosity and not by the market so it’s a solution looking for a problem to be solved.”

The AION Labs approach turns this on its head and is driving a “requirement-first” mentality, supporting the innovators to work on groundbreaking projects that are serving unmet needs in healthcare.

Enabling discovery: DenovAI Biotech

For Mati and the team, it’s all about helping scientist entrepreneurs develop new technologies and bring them into the pharmaceutical discovery and development space.

One of those scientist entrepreneurs is Dr Kashif Sadiq, Founder and CEO of DenovAI Biotech. Originally from London, he studied physics at Cambridge, followed by a PhD in molecular biophysics at University College London.

After working in several different institutions across Europe, he came to the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) in Germany, innovating in the space of protein design. When AION Labs posted a challenge in this area, he applied to take part and won, launching DenovAI Biotech as one of the consortium’s first startups.

Since launch, DenovAI has developed an AI-physics-led platform to discover new antibodies and proteins to create more effective drugs for undertreated conditions, such as cancer and neurodegenerative illnesses.

“Combining physics with generative AI enables us to ramp up the speed and accuracy of our discoveries,” says Kashif. “When applied to the real world, this has the potential to vastly reduce drug discovery timelines and costs.”

“This increased accuracy may also allow us to address previously untreatable diseases, driving transformative advances in human health and creating enormous potential for patients with unmet medical needs,” says Dr Tal Leibovich Rivkin, DenovAI COO.

Using the platform to make reliable drug candidates available for virtually any disease would be a game changer in the industry. “Essentially we are pioneering a new era of programmable biologics,” says Kashif.

Enabling discovery: Cellyrix Therapeutics

Dr. Avishai Gavish is a computational MD-PhD who pursued postdoctoral research at the Weizmann Institute with Dr. Itay Tirosh. His research revealed that multiple cancer types share similar expression profiles (termed "cell states"). "I found that even though individual cancers are very different, the variability within tumors is surprisingly similar."

Keen to translate these findings into real-world impact, he was invited to develop them into an AION Labs company after meetings with the AION team and several pharmaceutical partners. This led to the founding of Cellyrix, which leverages advanced computational analysis of transcriptional data to unlock insights into intra-tumor diversity and ultimately develop new treatments.

Collaborating for the greater good

Kashif, Tal and Avishai are very aware of the benefits that being part of the AION consortium delivers.

“Collaborating and having continuous scientific and strategic discussions with the pharma companies within AION creates a great foundation for us as a company,” says Tal. DenovAI is now in the strong position of having signed co-development research collaborations with three of the four pharma partners after only two years in business.

Avishai also emphasizes the importance of collaborating with pharma companies: "It's the connection, bringing them on board, brainstorming with them, making sure we're doing something valuable - that's what's so important."

“Bringing everyone together is also a great benefit when it comes to pooling knowledge”, says Christian. “One of the fundamental problems of AI is that you need very large amounts of high-quality research data and no pharma company by itself is big enough to have sufficient data. In this unique situation, four companies pool data sets and make them available to our startups, which solves a big problem and is a huge advantage in building our models.”

Ultimately, it’s about learning, about discovering. ‘Teva is not investing in this to see the monetary return, we are not a venture capitalist,’ explains Shiri. ‘Instead, we want to generate new technologies that can advance the field and support the entire industry, drawing on data, concepts, and capabilities that are synergistic to create more robust solutions.”

AION Labs is well placed, Mati Gill believes, to help answer some of the immense challenges facing global healthcare today – affordability, access and how to bring breakthrough therapeutics to patients. 

 “All of our scientific and commercial success is ultimately translated into doing good for people, everything we are working on is intended to benefit humanity.”

Read more about AION Labs’ pioneering work and meet some of the people involved

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