CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Nabla Bio, a biotechnology company pioneering de novo therapeutic design with generative AI, announced a new multi-year research collaboration with Takeda to apply its advanced AI and wet-lab platform across Takeda’s early-stage development programs.
Under the terms of the agreement, Nabla Bio will receive double-digit millions in upfront and research cost payments and is eligible for success-based payments that could exceed $1 billion in total.
This second collaboration builds upon the companies’ initial partnership launched in 2022 and will leverage Nabla Bio’s Joint Atomic Model (JAM) platform for the de novo design of antibodies, multispecifics, and other complex protein therapeutics targeting multiple and challenging biological pathways.
“Since 2022, we’ve collaborated with Takeda to push the boundaries of next-generation biologics discovery,” said Surge Biswas, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Nabla Bio. “This second collaboration builds on the success of our first program and reflects our shared conviction that de novo design and AI-driven optimization, powered by foundation models like JAM, can unlock entirely new therapeutic spaces and accelerate the development of new medicines at a scale and speed not seen before.”
“At Takeda, we are accelerating drug development by leveraging the latest advances in AI,” said Chris Arendt, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Research at Takeda. “Building upon the success of our first engagement with Nabla Bio, this collaboration applies their cutting-edge AI and wet lab to help us design and optimize protein therapeutics for applications across our therapeutic areas.”
Nabla Bio’s JAM platform integrates generative AI with human-relevant in vitro and in vivo testing, demonstrating double-digit success rates in de novo design across a broad range of targets. The platform has generated picomolar binders to challenging target classes such as G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) in true zero-shot settings and produced complex biologics including GPCR agonists, multispecifics, and receptor decoys. Nabla’s AI-designed therapeutics have also shown strong preclinical performance, including favorable pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and low immunogenicity in non-human primates.
