Roivant Inks $450 Million Worth Drug Discovery Deal with Silicon Therapeutics

Roivant Sciences, a healthcare company focused on applying technology to drug developments, has struck a deal with Silicon Therapeutics that will help bring the latter under the VantAI drug discovery group. The deal worth $450 million in Roivant equity includes additional payments for future commercial and regulatory milestones.

“We are delighted to integrate Silicon Therapeutics into Roivant as we continue to expand our capabilities in computationally-powered drug discovery,” said Matt Gline, Chief Executive Officer of Roivant Sciences. “We intend to leverage our established development apparatus as we rapidly advance promising compounds from our drug discovery engine into clinical studies.”

Silicon Therapeutics’ proprietary platform uses computational physics for the in-silico design and optimization of small molecule drugs. The platform helps amalgamate quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics and statistical thermodynamics to envisage binding energies and conformational behavior of molecules.

Roivant’s acquisition of Silicon Therapeutics will potentially complement their in-house protein degradation platform and will be powered by VantAI’s machine learning models. These advanced models are trained on degrader-specific experimental data and will be further complemented by Silicon Therapeutics’ computational resources. The combination of computational physics from Silicon and machine learning-based approaches from Roivant will help the latter to have the best of both worlds.

Lanny Sun, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Silicon Therapeutics stated, “Silicon Therapeutics was founded with a vision of transforming the pharmaceutical industry through the use of technology. By joining forces with Roivant, we can significantly accelerate making this vision a reality. Roivant has an impressive track record in clinical execution and building and deploying technology platforms to power pharmaceutical research, development, and commercialization.”

In the meantime, Silicon’s scientific research and development/technology heads namely, Woody Sherman, Ph.D.; Huafeng Xu, Ph.D.; and Chris Winter, Ph.D. will join the Roivant’s drug discovery leadership team and provide invaluable advice.

Sherman joined Silicon Therapeutics after spending 12 years as a Senior Executive at Schrödinger; Xu, spent 12 years at D.E. Shaw Research leading the development of methods including the highly popular Anton chip and Desmond software; and Winter is a drug discovery biologist whose illustrious work has helped 11 targeted cancer therapies enter clinical development. He was also the head of biology at Blueprint Medicines and Sanofi Oncology.

Market Positioning

While Roivant Sciences has tasted some success in bringing their drugs to Phase 3 trials, with the most recent being Tapinarof for plaque psoriasis, Boston-based Silicon Therapeutics is a newbie. In November 2020, Silicon Therapeutics injected patients having advanced solid tumors or lymphoma with their therapeutic drug SNX281 in a Phase I trial. The drug was designed based on the company’s proprietary drug discovery platform and results are yet to be analyzed. With a strategic partnership with Roivant Sciences, Silicon Therapeutics has nothing to lose, but only has market-share to gain and more opportunities to pursue.

Related Article: SK Holdings Supports Roivant’s New Protein Degradation Platform with US$ 200 Million Investment

References

1. https://roivant.com/roivant-grows-computational-drug-discovery-engine-with-acquisition-of-silicon-therapeutics.html

Author

Tulip Chakraborty