Immunai has signed an agreement worth up to $85 million with AstraZeneca to advance a new target for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), expanding their ongoing collaboration beyond oncology into autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.

The New York-based biotech said AstraZeneca will gain exclusive rights to develop and commercialise therapeutics directed at the IBD target, which was identified using Immunai’s artificial intelligence and single-cell analysis platform.

The discovery was made through Immunai’s Immunodynamics Engine, which integrates clinically annotated single-cell multi-omics datasets with machine learning. Built on its proprietary immune cell atlas, AMICA, the platform models immune function and dysfunction to uncover immune-modulating targets across multiple disease areas, including cancer, autoimmunity, and inflammation.

Noam Solomon, co-founder and chief executive of Immunai, said the partnership highlights how artificial intelligence can help decode complex immune pathways and accelerate drug discovery.

“Target discovery has always been a challenging process, especially in complex immune diseases like IBD,” Solomon said. “This agreement marks a turning point. We’re showing that by modelling the immune system with high-resolution single-cell data and artificial intelligence, we are able to not just find new targets, but also understand why they matter. We’re proud to expand our collaboration with AstraZeneca, supporting them to discover and develop new therapies.”

The new deal builds on a multi-year collaboration between the two companies that began in 2022. In 2024, AstraZeneca committed $18 million to use Immunai’s machine learning and immune-mapping capabilities to inform its oncology clinical trials. That work focuses on dose selection, mechanism-of-action analysis, patient response prediction, and biomarker discovery.

The expanded agreement underscores AstraZeneca’s investment in data-driven discovery and Immunai’s growing role in applying artificial intelligence to immune system modelling. As large pharma companies seek to improve R&D efficiency, collaborations like this point to a broader shift towards integrating AI, single-cell analysis, and immune data to identify and validate new drug targets.