Owkin, Sanofi Expand AI Collaboration to Develop Drug Discovery Agents
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The five-year collaboration will use Owkin’s K Pro AI scientist platform as the deployment foundation for these systems within Sanofi’s research and development operations.
Owkin and Sanofi have expanded their artificial intelligence partnership through a multi-year agreement to co-develop AI-driven agents aimed at improving drug discovery and development workflows.
The five-year collaboration will use Owkin’s K Pro AI scientist platform as the deployment foundation for these systems within Sanofi’s research and development operations.
Under the agreement, Owkin will lead the development of AI agents tailored specifically for Sanofi’s drug development needs. These agents will be delivered through K Pro, which will function under a five-year licensing structure. The companies said the systems are designed to operate as intelligent assistants capable of performing complex tasks across multiple stages of drug research and development.
K Pro integrates multimodal patient data with biological AI systems to support decision-making across the pharmaceutical value chain, spanning early-stage discovery to clinical development. According to Owkin, the platform is positioned to embed agentic AI directly into R&D workflows rather than serving as a standalone analytics tool.
“Building on our collaboration with Sanofi, this marks a shift toward truly embedded AI,” said Thomas Clozel, CEO and cofounder of Owkin. He added that the system is designed to help Sanofi “harness agentic systems within their own workflows” to improve decision-making across drug development.
Sanofi has previously described its broader strategy as an “R&D-driven, AI-powered biopharma” approach, with ongoing efforts to integrate digital tools into research, manufacturing, and supply chain operations. The company said the objective is to reduce timelines from discovery to therapy by improving speed and precision in decision-making processes.
The expanded collaboration builds on an existing relationship between the two companies that began in 2021, when Sanofi made a $180 million equity investment in Owkin and entered into an oncology-focused partnership across four cancer types. That collaboration initially focused on AI and federated learning applications in disease modeling, biomarker identification, and clinical trial design while maintaining data privacy across distributed hospital datasets.
The partnership later expanded into immunology, where AI tools were used to support drug positioning and identify patient subgroups for Sanofi’s pipeline programs.
Owkin launched K Pro in 2025 as an agentic AI co-pilot for biomedical research, designed to support decision-making across drug discovery and development using multimodal data and natural language interfaces. The company recently announced a similar multi-year licensing agreement with AstraZeneca to deploy AI agents for competitive intelligence and R&D workflows.
The deal also comes amid growing industry and regulatory focus on the use of AI in drug development. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research has reported rising use of AI in drug applications across nonclinical, clinical, and manufacturing stages, and issued draft guidance in 2025 outlining expectations for AI use in regulatory decision-making for drugs and biologics.
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