Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, the company that built the original RNAi therapeutics playbook with Onpattro, Amvuttra and Leqvio, is paying Inceptive Nucleics $30 million upfront and committing up to $2 billion in milestones to plug a Transformer-era foundation model into its siRNA design pipeline. The agreement, announced June 3, is one of the largest single AI design pacts an established RNAi company has signed.
The pioneer behind Inceptive
Inceptive was co-founded in 2021 by Jakob Uszkoreit — a co-author of the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning ChatGPT — and Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das. The company has raised about $120 million from backers including Nvidia and is building generative models trained on RNA sequence, function and structure data so they can transfer learning across modalities without per-program retraining.
What the deal targets
Alnylam and Inceptive plan to model target mRNAs, jointly explore sequence space and novel chemical modifications, and use Inceptive's models to predict top-performing siRNA candidates in preclinical settings. In joint exploratory work before signing, Inceptive's model reportedly adapted to Alnylam's program within weeks on relatively small datasets, an indicator the team takes as evidence the foundation model can generalise across RNAi chemistries. Alnylam will retain development rights to candidates flagged by the system, while Inceptive collects performance-based milestones up to the $2 billion ceiling.
Part of a wider AI-pharma sprint
The deal lands amid a broader rush by large biopharmas to lock down dedicated AI design partners. Alphabet's AI drug-discovery arm Isomorphic Labs recently closed a $2.1B Series B, and Bristol Myers Squibb signed a Claude-led R&D program with Anthropic last month. For RNA medicines specifically, the Alnylam pact is the clearest signal yet that the field expects sequence-based foundation models to start materially reshaping how new candidates get designed and prioritised.
Reporting based on coverage from Fierce Biotech, BusinessWire and Alnylam Investor Relations.