Sanofi Inks Five-Year Pact to License Owkin’s AI Scientist K Pro for Next-Gen Biopharma Agents

Editor’s Take: Major pharma companies continue to seek partnerships that leverage AI workflows and tech.

Sanofi has a new agreement with Owkin, an agentic AI company pioneering biological artificial superintelligence for drug discovery and development. Headlining the multi-year collaboration is Sanofi licensing K Pro, Owkin’s AI scientist, for five years to co-develop next-generation biopharma agents.

How Owkin AI Agents Operate

The AI agents ideally will operate as intelligent assistants that autonomously perform complex tasks in drug research and development. Owkin will lead end to end development, with the platform reinforcing Sanofi’s existing agentic AI capabilities.

The agreement echoes one reached just weeks ago between Owkin and AstraZeneca, to use K Pro for three years.

Major pharmaceutical companies continue to seek industry partnerships that leverage AI technologies and workflows. Earlier this week, Pfizer entered such a licensing agreement with Chai Discovery. In May, Bristol Myers Squibb announced a strategic agreement with Anthropic, deploying Claude’s agentic AI across 30,000 employees.

Elsewhere, Quotient Sciences reported the successful initiation of a clinical study evaluating a novel drug product developed using AI.

Sanofi Continues Collaboration

“Building on our collaboration with Sanofi, this marks a shift toward truly embedded AI,” Owkin CEO/Co-Founder Thomas Clozel said. “Owkin believes that, with K Pro, Sanofi can further harness agentic systems within their own workflows

Clozel added this would help Sanofi unlock the full value of its data to “accelerate better decisions across drug development.”

Sanofi Chief Digital Officer Emmanuel Frenehard agreed.

“We are continually investing in frontier AI solutions with the potential to accelerate and improve decision-making,” Frenehard said. “By implementing purpose-built agentic systems into our workflows, we empower our teams to operate with greater speed, depth, and confidence.”

Sanofi has collaborated with Owkin since 2021, namely through a €90 million (US$104 million) strategic partnership. This pact is focused on target identification in oncology and patient subgrouping. Later, the two companies expanded the partnership to include drug positioning for Sanofi’s immunology pipeline.