Exscientia Plc

BenevolentAI’s CEO Joerg Moeller is stepping down effective immediately, the London biotech said Thursday, in the latest leadership shakeup atop the company. Since going public in early 2022 via a SPAC, BenevolentAI’s stock price has fallen over 90%. Its lead drug candidate fell short in a mid-stage eczema study last year, eventually leading to the program’s discontinuation. Moeller, formerly the global R&D head of Leo Pharma, was brought in to replace former CEO Joanna Shields in January. Now, less than 10 months into his tenure, BenevolentAI announced Moeller is headed out the door. The company didn’t give a reason for his exit, other than to say it was “immediate.” The company also didn’t name a replacement, though it did say that founder Ken Mulvany is now executive chairman. Mulvany rejoined BenevolentAI’s board in May, amid a broader boardroom battle . In a Thursday statement, Mulvany said the company has “only scratched the surface of our platform’s incredible potential.” Founded in 2013, BenevolentAI was one of the first biotech startups focused on artificial intelligence, alongside peers like Exscientia, Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Atomwise. Benevolent had pitched its AI approach as allowing it to slash preclinical costs and move faster. In its pitch to investors when it was going public via a SPAC, the biotech shared projections that its pipeline would grow from 12 programs in 2021 to more than 50 in 2026, eventually reaching 87 in 2030. It said its aim was to file one to two INDs per year for the next few years, increasing to a rate of two to three IND filings per year for 2027 to 2031. But those bold forecasts haven’t panned out. Today, BenevolentAI’s pipeline lists one program in the clinic and eight preclinical programs. It has slashed R&D and overall spending plans, including rounds of layoffs last May and this April . The company’s sole clinical-stage drug reported positive results from a healthy volunteer Phase 1 study earlier this year. And the company said last month it is in active out-licensing and partnership discussions around that molecule. BenevolentAI’s struggles are in line with several of its peers who have pitched R&D revolutions with their technology over the past decade. But the lead drug candidates from these AI-focused biotechs have fallen short in the clinic . Several of these original AI-focused biotechs have struggled to survive. Exscientia recently agreed to a merger deal with Recursion. Atomwise’s founding CEO Abe Heifets quietly left the company earlier this year with no announced successor, Endpoints News previously reported .

Terray Therapeutics has raised a $120 million Series B round, aiming to get its first drug candidate into the clinic while advancing in its AI-fueled approach to making molecules. Founding CEO Jacob Berlin exclusively told Endpoints News that the 110-employee startup is generating the “key dataset missing for AI-driven drug discovery” in studying billions of protein-small molecule interactions. Terray has developed tiny chips that can generate more biological data than previously possible. Berlin has spent the past 12 years developing these chips, or microarrays, which are about the size of a nickel and contain millions of wells to hold molecules in place. He left a tenured professorship at City of Hope to start Terray in 2018, which now operates out of a 52,000-square-foot laboratory in the foothills of Los Angeles. The biotech uses these chips to see how tens of millions of molecules bind — or don’t — to a protein of interest. That echoes a common refrain that AI breakthroughs only happen with enough of the right data. And getting those biological data require the right hardware. In the case of the recent Nobel Prize-winning protein model, AlphaFold, it was built off the Protein Data Bank, a painstakingly curated public resource that itself was accelerated by then-new crystallography and sequencing machines. Terray has generated its own proprietary dataset of protein-molecule interactions 50 times larger than publicly available data. The biotech has used that data to train AI models to discover and design small molecules in a new way for a biopharma company, placing the AI’s ideas at the center of its R&D process. The question is if these chips, data and models will ultimately make better drugs. Terray’s Series B will provide multiple years of runway to start finding an answer, which includes aiming to enter the clinic with its lead drug in 2026, Berlin said. Terray is keeping its pipeline under wraps, beyond disclosing a general focus on immunology. Terray is one of several AI bios taking that chance to build its own pipeline. AI-focused startups also working on small molecules include Iambic Therapeutics, Exscientia and Atomwise. Terray CFO and COO Eli Berlin, the brother of the CEO, said the biotech’s hardware has been key in attracting investors in this market. “People recognize the difference in our story,” he said. “That hardware innovation really resonated, because it lets us build these scaled datasets that are precise and iterate rapidly.” Terray’s chips helped design its first molecules, which Jacob Berlin said are often in new chemical space. “Every single molecule we bring forward has a scaffold that has been de novo discovered and optimized at Terray from the ground up,” Berlin said. “That’s totally different than what you see across the ecosystem, where AI models have to stay close to historical sets of data because they don’t have our hardware innovation.” Terray’s process starts by studying a protein target of interest against 80 million molecules, synthesized on nanoscale beads and placed on its chips. After first looking for binding molecules, they then zoom in on the hits to run more screens. As Terray brings compounds into lead optimization or the stage of refining a lead into a drug candidate, AI models suggest what to do next. Humans still make the decisions, Berlin said, but AI increasingly shapes Terray’s experiments. For instance, the company built a diffusion model to generate small molecules. In an August preprint , Terray’s team put their own twist on the diffusion architecture. They require it not only to diffuse out from a starting molecule to generate new compounds but also to diffuse backward to that starting point. That acts like guard rails in restricting the model’s creations, discouraging it from generating radically different molecules. “Computationally, it basically inherently bounds just how wild it gets,” Berlin said. For the molecules at the end of this process, Terray is keeping them under wraps, but Berlin said they have completely new designs that may raise some industry eyebrows. “In every case, med chemists would be surprised. They would say, ‘Huh,’” he said. “I’m surprised by what we find and what we move, so I think other people will be too.” Editor’s note: This story has been corrected in referring to Terray’s chip as microarrays, not microassays.

Plus, news about TenNor Therapeutics, Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals, Orasis and Optus Pharmaceuticals: Exscientia receives $15M milestone from Sanofi: The companies are advancing two programs as part of a deal first announced in 2022. Exscientia said it’s now eligible for additional milestones worth more than $600 million, in addition to royalties. — Jaimy Lee Eli Lilly brings Gateway Labs to China: The drugmaker is launching one of its Gateway Labs in China, the company said Tuesday, the day after announcing plans to open one in the UK. Lilly also said it’s opening a research hub in Beijing called the Lilly China Medical Innovation Center. — Anna Brown TenNor raises more than $42M in Series E: The Chinese company plans to use the funds to support the development and potential approval in China of rifasutenizol, its candidate for Helicobacter pylori infection. AMR Action Fund chipped in as a new investor, alongside existing supporters such as Zhongshan Venture Capital. — Ayisha Sharma Gan & Lee’s trio of diabetes drugs passes mid-stage trials: The Beijing-based biotech unveiled promising blood sugar data from its GLP-1 agonist (GZR18), once-weekly insulin analog (GZR4) and premixed dual insulin analog (GZR101) from their respective mid-stage studies. Notably, the GLP-1 agonist showed greater reductions in HbA1c and body weight than Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide. — Ayisha Sharma Orasis signs licensing deal with Korean drugmaker: Optus is paying $18 million to commercialize, import and market Qlosi, an eye drop for presbyopia, in South Korea. It plans to launch the treatment there by 2026. — Jaimy Lee