AstraZeneca has inked a deal worth “up to” $555 million with San-Francisco startup Algen Biotechnologies to mine new immunology targets using AI-guided CRISPR functional genomics. The structure is familiar—upfront plus R&D, regulatory and commercial milestones, exclusive development rights for AZ—but one feature stands out: no equity stake in the startup. That’s unusual in today’s platform gold-rush and it telegraphs how big pharma increasingly wants algorithmically derived assets rather than ownership exposure to the AI platforms that generate them.
What’s actually been bought here
According to the companies, Algen’s AlgenBrain™ platform perturbs genes in relevant human cell types at single-cell resolution,
