Owkin is a French-American start-up founded by Thomas Clozel, a doctor with academic roots at Cornell University and Gilles Wainrib, an engineer from Normale Sup. Their goal: radically transform the pharmaceutical research sector thanks to artificial intelligence. For this, they have more than one trick up their sleeve!
Convergence between AI and medicine to accelerate research
Owkin’s story began seven years ago, when Clozel and Wainrib met and decided to join forces to create a new kind of technological platform. Their ambition: “ flip biotech like a Flamby “. To do this, the two want to develop an AI company that could tackle several problems head-on: cancer detection or precision medicine.
Clozel expressed his vision of artificial intelligence to Challengesand more precisely in the DeepTechs podcast : “ AI accelerates and increases medical research, making it more precise “. After fundraising 330 million euros in which Google Ventures participated, Owkin is now valued at $1.5 billion. Which makes it the first French unicorn in the sector.
Owkin’s two founders aspire to completely reconfigure the industry by replacing traditional big pharma companies through more agile and innovative solutions. A well-rehearsed speech, but what is hidden behind these beautiful promises?
Owkin: young but powerful
To tackle this task, Owkin is rather well equipped. With a total workforce of 350 people (where doctors are in the minority), it has already reached a certain level of success and growth. Based in Paris, its team is partly made up of 120 software engineers, AI specialists and data scientists.
It’s quite simply the contingent of AI specialists the most important of the Old Continent. This places it almost at the same level as Google Deepmind, a department of Google at the origin of AlphaFold.
Under the direction of Jean-Philippe Vert, founder of Google Brain Paris, this huge team is working on a generative AI system. Ultimately, it will be possible to link all the stages of biology by exploiting data from American and European hospitals. Clozel highlights an aspect sometimes forgotten in standard drug design models: the importance of knowing the origins of the disease before developing a compound. “ There are many cancers today that we understand nothing about. » he explains.
100 million euros have already been put on the table by Owkin in order to access the data of partner hospitals, which will remain on their servers for the sake of data security. Any new data generated by their AI model will be accessible to hospitals, although Owkin will retain intellectual property over these analysis results.
Clozel is quite frank in his approach and does not mince his words. Owkin is here to “ Replace big pharmas whose model is outdated and which often depend on a single drug. Today, they have become M&A companies (Editor’s note : merger and acquisition)”. The start-up does not aim to improve existing processes, but aims to replace a pharmaceutical model considered obsolete by developing high-throughput drugs and providing diagnostic tools. Will it, like AlphaFold, be at the origin of a paradigm shift in pharmaceutical research? The potential, in any case, is definitely there.
- Owkin is a Franco-American start-up founded by Thomas Clozel and Gilles Wainrib.
- Its goal is to develop an AI system aimed at encompassing the entire process of drug creation using AI.
- Its final ambition is to replace the traditional model of pharmaceutical research and historical companies.