Ochre Bio, a pioneer in chronic liver disease medicine development, has announced the start of a multi-year data licence agreement with GSK. The partnership will provide GSK with access to Ochre Bio’s computational biology, cellular and perfused human organ platforms to generate proprietary human liver datasets and non-exclusive access to their extensive library of historical liver data.
The collaboration will enable Ochre Bio and GSK to deepen the understanding of liver biology, aligned with GSK’s disease area focus in hepatology, with the aim to further prioritise and accelerate development of medicines to address liver disease. The data will be used by both Ochre Bio and GSK to build better AI models, allowing for fewer, but more precise experiments to aid in target choice.
Jack O’Meara, Co-founder and CEO at Ochre Bio, said: “Data innovation is as important as algorithmic innovation when investing in ML workflows. Both Ochre Bio and GSK share a commitment to providing liver disease patients with more effective medicines, and believe in a data-driven approach to improve therapeutic discovery. These large-scale, causal human datasets will be foundational for our respective liver R&D pipelines.”
Kim Branson, SVP, Global Head of AI and Machine Learning at GSK, said: “In addition to our programs in MASH to hepatitis B, we are committed to addressing unmet need in liver disease by generating unique data in human derived systems. Ochre Bio’s platform will provide GSK with foundational data sets to create AI models allowing us to better understand liver function and disease for the development of novel medicines.”
This licence agreement includes data to be generated from single-cell sequencing to study cell populations in perfused human livers, as well as data generated from large-scale gene perturbation in human liver cells.
The deal has a total value of up to $37.5m for both co-exclusive and non-exclusive data licences.