Owkin announces Owkin K1.0 Turbigo, a cutting-edge operating system to create the first AGI for biology, at JP Morgan Healthcare Conference

• Owkin’s proprietary methodologies and AI agents are integrated into K1.0 to support drug discovery, development, and diagnostics
• K1.0 allows Owkin to deliver actionable biological insights for partners and internal research programs
• K2.0 agents will act as copilots to scientists. In the future, these agents could even replace human scientists and run their own research programs and lab experiments

Owkin, the first end-to-end AI-biotech that uses cutting-edge causal AI to unlock precision drug discovery, development, and diagnostics, has announced Owkin K1.0 - a proprietary operating system for discovering new disease biology with the goal to become the first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for biology.

Owkin K1.0 brings 8 years of cutting-edge technologies together in one operating system built by top researchers and AI scientists. It is powered by multimodal patient data and state-of-the-art AI. Owkin K1.0 has access to patient data and samples from Owkin’s federated patient data network of top research institutions. It integrates curated data from thousands of cohorts and more than a million patients, including thousands from Owkin’s MOSAIC project - the largest multimodal spatial omics dataset in oncology. This data is interrogated via state-of-the-art AI, including Foundation and Large Multimodal Models, to deliver actionable insights that drive pipeline value. Owkin’s wet lab validates these insights and re-incorporates the new laboratory data into Owkin K1.0 to continually strengthen its models’ performance. The OS powers downstream tasks such as biomarker, indication, target and population discovery, clinical trial optimization, and development of AI diagnostics. All these tasks are based on biomarkers extracted from newly discovered biology.

Jean-Philippe Vert, Chief Research & Technology Officer of Owkin, said:

With biological challenges growing beyond the reach of human cognition, we need a fresh approach to drug discovery and development. Today, the overall likelihood of a new drug successfully reaching the market is just 6.7%.¹ Owkin’s mission is to dramatically increase the probability of success in bringing promising medicines to market more efficiently, based on a novel understanding of disease biology. We cannot rely solely on AI to accelerate drug discovery before deciphering the “why” of disease onset and treatment response. Owkin K1.0 is the operating system that will drive this transformation.

Owkin K has allowed us to deliver value to eight of the top ten pharmaceutical companies, including Sanofi, BMS, and AstraZeneca, and launch Owkin’s internal therapeutic and diagnostic pipelines. Breakthrough discoveries made through Owkin K1.0 have resulted in 37 patents and applications, 64 peer-reviewed articles in journals like Nature Medicine and conferences like NeurIPS and ASCO, and wins at prestigious AI competitions like Kaggle, where Owkin’s AI beat 3000 other teams.

Building the Future of Owkin K2.0

Owkin K 2.0 is a productivity software to augment biological research. Over the next year, Owkin will develop agents that automatically interrogate multimodal spatial data through LLM-enabled natural language input, integrate molecular design and literature review into its target discovery agent, and optimize experimental protocols.

Owkin will fully integrate the next-generation Owkin K2.0 Operating System with its lab to form an agentic AI-operated robotic lab to validate our discoveries across a spectrum of patient-derived in-situ, ex-vivo, and in-vitro assays to optimize biological relevance and shrink the translational gap. The lab will enable perturbation experiments to test hypotheses and leverage the data generated to inform Owkin’s AI agents. Inferences from Owkin’s AI diagnostics and academic partner data will continually feed the OS to break the “data wall” (the idea that AI will run out of training data). Owkin K2.0 agents will act as copilots to scientists. In the future, these agents could even replace human scientists and run their own research programs, lab experiments and manage the life cycle of drugs. This represents Owkin’s ambition to move towards a positive singularity that can enable a complete understanding of complex biology.

Thomas Clozel, MD, co-founder and CEO of Owkin, said:

Owkin’s goal is to move towards a biological Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), able to understand biological systems in a way humans have so far been unable to - allowing them to unlock complex biology, like the language of the immune system. We aim for Owkin K to become the reference operating system for biology and for every pharma, biotech, and academic researcher to use our OS to transform their research. In this way, we want to be instrumental in helping break silos and the data wall that has up to now limited biomedical research.

Thomas Clozel will announce Owkin K at the Fierce Pharma Marquee Panel at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference on January 15th. He’ll be joined by Greg Meyers, Chief Technology Officer of BMS,  Emmanuel Frenehard, Chief Digital Officer of Sanofi, and Jorge Reis-Filho, Vice President, Cancer Biomarker Development at AstraZeneca to discuss how the combination of agentic and human intelligence can transform drug discovery, development, and diagnostics.

Media Contact: Owkin@brands2life.com

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¹ Chancellor, D. (2024) Why are clinical development success rates falling? Citeline Insights, 16 May. Available at: https://insights.citeline.com/IV154612/Why-Are-Clinical-Development-Success-Rates-Falling/ (Accessed: 1 November 2024)