Novo Nordisk has signed an agreement with Valo Health for the discovery and development of new therapies to treat cardiometabolic diseases.

The companies will leverage the AI-driven large human dataset and computation expertise of Valo to develop the treatments.

The alliance will also utilise the Opal Computational Platform of Valo and the real-world data of patients, AI-powered small molecule discovery and a human tissue modelling platform known as Biowire.

The preclinical expertise of Valo will be leveraged to detect and validate new druggable targets.

The partnership will also utilise these capabilities to develop drug candidates against these targets and forecast their safety and efficacy.

Novo Nordisk will license three preclinical drug discovery programmes developed using Valo’s platform for treating cardiovascular ailments.

Valo is entitled to receive upfront and near-term milestone payments of $60m (£49.19m) from Novo Nordisk. 

Novo Nordisk will also make potential milestone payments of $2.7bn for up to 11 programmes, apart from funds for research and development and royalties.

Novo Nordisk executive vice-president and chief scientific officer Marcus Schindler stated: “Artificial Intelligence and machine learning hold the promise to positively impact drug discovery and development, in particular enabling our vision of leveraging human datasets early in the process, which should lead to a better understanding of target biology. 

“Valo brings a differentiated and powerful approach to using these technologies on real-world human data to generate new insights and translate them into potential therapeutics for the benefit of patients suffering from cardiometabolic conditions.”

The latest development comes after Novo Nordisk partnered with the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard to identify drug targets for type 2 diabetes and cardiometabolic diseases.