November 24th 2020, New York － Owkin, a startup company that deploys artificial intelligence (AI) and Federated Learning (FL) technologies to augment medical research, accelerate drug development and enable scientific discoveries, announces a collaboration with the Institut Pasteur, a private, non-profit foundation whose mission is to help prevent and treat diseases, mainly those of infectious origin, through research, teaching, and public health initiatives.

This collaboration will focus on developing a new machine learning model capable of identifying COVID-19, and more generally, any coronaviruses, protein sequences (as known as epitopes) with high immunogenic potential that could be used for peptide-based future vaccines. The machine learning models’ performance will be compared to existing models currently not taking into account the critical biochemical properties of such epitopes. Based on the challenges of such a current COVID-19 pandemic and the need for a vaccine, we are focusing our effort on defining peptides expressed by all present strains of the actual COVID-19 virus and any future human coronaviruses.

Mikhail Zaslavskyv, Chief Research Officer at Owkin:

Owkin is a French-American startup that uses artificial intelligence to find the right treatment for every patient. Our focus is to use AI to discover and develop better treatments for unmet medical needs, starting with the fight against cancer.

We use AI to identify new drug candidates, de-risk and accelerate clinical trials and build diagnostic tools that improve patient outcomes. Using federated learning, a pioneering collaborative AI framework, Owkin enables medical and biopharma partners to unlock valuable insights from siloed datasets while protecting patient privacy and securing proprietary data. 

Owkin was co-founded by Thomas Clozel MD, a former assistant professor in clinical onco-hematology, and Gilles Wainrib, a pioneer in the field of machine learning in biology, in 2016. Owkin has raised over $300 million and became a unicorn through a $180 million investment from biopharma company Sanofi in November 2021.