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

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.

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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