HQ Team
January 9, 2025: Novo Nordisk A/S, a Danish pharmaceutical company, has expanded its agreement with US-based Valo Health Inc., almost to double the number of drugs to be jointly developed, according to a statement.
The Lexington, Massachusetts-headquartered company will get near-term payments of up to $190 million to discover and develop medicines for obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Valo will also be eligible to receive milestone payments of approximately $4.6 billion, additional research and development funding and potential royalty payments, according to a statement from Novo.
An earlier agreement in September 2023 targeted the development of up to 11 drug programmes, primarily focused on cardiovascular disease.
Human data, genetics
The expanded collaboration will continue to leverage the capabilities of Valo’s Opal Computational Platform, as well as key joint capabilities in human data and genetics, with Novo Nordisk’s expertise in cardiometabolic diseases, according to the statement.
Marcus Schindler, executive vice president and chief scientific officer of Novo Nordisk, said: “We have already begun to realise the potential of combining the capabilities of Valo and Novo Nordisk to advance multiple AI-powered, human-centric programmes, and we believe this partnership will help Novo Nordisk fulfil our ambition to expand the number of new drug programmes we bring to the clinic.”
The companies have identified several novel targets that may form the basis of differentiated cardiometabolic drug programmes and are “actively working” on multiple small molecule preclinical drug discovery programmes.
Brian Alexander, CEO of Valo Health and CEO-Partner, Flagship Pioneering, said: “We are excited to build off our early progress with Novo Nordisk, a global leader in obesity and diabetes therapeutics, especially given the renaissance moment in the treatment of cardiometabolic diseases.
AI small molecule design
“This level of investment is a testament to our close partnership in deploying human-centric artificial intelligence to rapidly discover and develop novel cardiovascular and metabolic disease therapeutics.”
“The partnership fully leverages the Opal Computational Platform by seeking to identify novel therapeutic targets in large real-world patient datasets, validate those targets using human preclinical models, and develop therapeutics against those targets with human-centric AI small molecule design.”
Novo Nordisk and Valo plan to continue working closely together to “derive novel insights from human genetic and longitudinal patient data at the intersection of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.”
Valo Health’s drug development platform uses artificial intelligence to identify and validate new drug targets.
