Charles River and Valence Discovery Announce Strategic Partnership to Provide Clients with AI-Enabled Drug Design Capabilities

Partnership will provide access to Valence’s machine learning platform to accelerate preclinical drug discovery efforts

WILMINGTON, Mass. & MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--$CRL #Biopharma--Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. (NYSE: CRL) and Valence Discovery today announced the formation of a strategic partnership to provide clients access to Valence’s artificial intelligence platform for molecular property prediction, generative chemistry, and multiparameter optimization.

Building on research done by Valence’s founding team at Mila, the world’s largest deep learning research institute, the Valence platform enables the design of small molecule drug candidates in novel regions of chemical space, followed by rapid optimization against project-specific potency, selectivity, safety, and pharmacology criteria. Valence has pioneered the application of few-shot learning in drug design, allowing the company to unlock prediction tasks for which only small amounts of training data are available, overcoming a critical limitation of existing machine learning technologies in drug discovery.

Partnering to Accelerate Discoveries

By combining best-in-class machine learning technologies with Charles River’s end-to-end capabilities, the alliance has the potential to significantly accelerate discovery efforts from hit design through lead optimization.

Through the collaboration, Charles River clients will have the option to access Valence’s platform to support their drug discovery efforts. When taking advantage of this option, clients can expect increased diversity in chemical matter being investigated, in combination with more rapid optimization against complex, project-specific design criteria, ultimately reducing timelines and improving success rates for drug discovery projects.

Approved Quotes

• “This collaboration reflects Charles River’s ongoing commitment to enhancing our portfolio of innovative technology solutions. We look forward to leveraging Valence’s unique platform to improve outcomes for our clients.” – Birgit Girshick, Corporate Executive Vice President, Discovery and Safety Assessment, Biologics Testing Solutions, and Avian Vaccine Services, Charles River
• “The Valence platform offers a step-change improvement over existing de novo design technologies. We’ve been consistently impressed by Valence Discovery’s ability to generate high quality chemical matter that’s readily synthesizable, in novel regions of chemical space, from datasets not otherwise accessible to machine learning methods.” – Grant Wishart, PhD, Director of Computer Aided Drug Design, Charles River
• “We are thrilled to be partnering with Charles River, a global leader trusted by many of the world’s top pharmaceutical and biotech companies. This collaboration is an important step in furthering our mission of empowering every drug discovery scientist with the latest innovations in AI-enabled drug design.”– Daniel Cohen, CEO of Valence Discovery

About Valence’s AI-Enabled Drug Design Platform

The Valence platform expands upon academia-leading research done by the company’s founding team at Mila, the world’s largest deep learning research institute. In particular, Valence has pioneered the application of few-shot learning in drug design, allowing the company to unlock prediction tasks for which only small amounts of training data are available, including novel targets and complex ADME criteria, while also ensuring that AI-generated molecules are of high medicinal chemistry quality and readily synthesizable. In addition, Valence uses active learning and iterative optimization strategies to ensure that only the most information-rich compounds are selected for synthesis, enabling the design of compounds meeting the target potency, selectivity, and ADME criteria in fewer iterations, and with far less data, than otherwise possible.

About Valence Discovery

Valence is committed to unlocking the true potential of deep learning in drug design by unifying best-in-class deep learning technologies with intuitive infrastructure to make these technologies more broadly accessible to R&D organizations of all sizes. Valence’s AI-enabled drug design platform has been extensively validated and is currently being used to identify and design drug candidates in collaboration with industry-leading partners. The company is pioneering the application of few-shot learning in drug design and is developing and deploying novel machine learning methods for molecular property prediction, generative chemistry, and multiparameter optimization. Valence (formerly InVivo AI) was founded in 2018, is advised by deep learning pioneer, Dr. Yoshua Bengio, and is proudly headquartered in Montreal at Mila, the world’s largest deep learning research institute, with an office in Cambridge, Mass. To learn more, please visit www.valencediscovery.com.

About Charles River

Charles River provides essential products and services to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, government agencies and leading academic institutions around the globe accelerate their research and drug development efforts. Our dedicated employees are focused on providing clients with exactly what they need to improve and expedite the discovery, early-stage development and safe manufacture of new therapies for the patients who need them. To learn more about our unique portfolio and breadth of services, visit www.criver.com.

Charles River Investor Contact:
Todd Spencer
Corporate Vice President, Investor Relations
+1-781-222-6455
todd.spencer@crl.com

Charles River Media Contact:
Amy Cianciaruso
Corporate Vice President, Public Relations
+1-781-222-6168
amy.cianciaruso@crl.com

Valence Corporate Contact:
Therence Bois
Chief Operating Officer, Valence Discovery
hello@valencediscovery.com

Valence Media Contact:
Jessica Yingling, Ph.D.
Little Dog Communications Inc.
jessica@litldog.com
+1-858-344-8091