June 3 Company Quick Takes: EU pharmas form consortium to predict late-stage success; plus Lilly/Atomwise, Gilead/HitGen, Emergent and more

EU public-private consortium aims to better predict late-stage compounds
A group of pharmaceutical, technology and academic institutions formed a consortium to use machine learning on chemical libraries of 10 pharmaceutical companies to develop a platform that can more accurately predict promising late-stage compounds. The project, MELLODDY (Machine Learning Ledger Orchestration for Drug Discovery), includes 17 partners from across Europe with the Janssen Pharmaceutica NV unit of Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) as the pharma industry lead. The three-year project has an estimated budget of €18.4 million ($20.7 million) and receives funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative.

Lilly taps Atomwise's AI technology for drug discovery
Atomwise Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.) will apply its artificial intelligence technology to identify preclinical drug candidates for up to 10 targets selected by Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE:LLY). Atomwise may receive up to $1 million per target in discovery milestones and up to $550 million in development and commercialization milestones. Atomwise has the option to develop compounds that Lilly chooses not to advance into the clinic...