Valo Health Is Partnering With Charles River Laboratories To Accelerate Preclinical Drug Discovery
Drug research at Valo Health’s lab in Watertown, MA.
Valo Health
It’s no secret that developing a new therapeutic is a slow and expensive process. On average it takes over a decade to take a drug from idea to market, and a recent estimate in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the average cost for that process is over $900 million.
It’s in the hope of speeding up that process that Boston-based Charles River Laboratories and Wilmington, DE-based Valo Heath announced Tuesday that they are partnering to produce a combined customer offering for preclinical drug discovery. That offering, which is set to be released in mid-2022, combines Valo’s AI small molecule drug discovery platform Opal with Charles’ River’s service offerings in discovery optimization, safety testing, IND submissions and more.
“We’re basically taking our computational capability, their drug discovery and development capabilities, and creating a new offering that’s a transformative artificial intelligence-enabled drug discovery and development platform,” says Valo CEO David Berry.
Founded in 2018, Valo has been working to develop its Opal platform, which combines artificial intelligence with longitudinal data from human patients. This combination is being used by the company to predict the kinds of molecules that might make good drugs for particular conditions. But Opal doesn’t just look at whether a molecule can disrupt a disease at the cellular level – it also works to predict how a drug might impact a patient on the whole, including predicting side effects. The company has two drug candidates getting ready to enter phase 2 clinical trials and one in an IND enabling study, with more drug candidates being developed.
“Artificial intelligence is transforming how we approach drug discovery, and Valo’s Opal Platform, combined with our end-to-end portfolio, offers the potential to significantly accelerate, streamline and de-risk the preclinical drug discovery and development process,” Charles River CEO James Foster said in a statement.
Charles River isn’t the only believer in Valo. The company has raised nearly $500 million to date, and investors include Koch Disruptive Technologies, Mirae Asset Capital, HBM Healthcare Investments, Atinum Investment, Invus Public Equities and Flagship Pioneering. Last summer, Valo began the process to go public in a SPAC deal with Khosla Ventures Acquisition Co., but the two entities mutually agreed to abandon that process in November.
The exact details – including pricing – of Valo’s and Charles River’s combined offering are still being hammered out, Berry says, and will be made clear closer to the launch of the product. But the two companies plan to “run the gamut” in terms of therapeutic targets and accessibility to pharmaceutical customers, Berry says.
“We’re very excited about what we’re going to be able to do by locking arms and marching forward together,” he adds.
