Noetik completes the first milestone under its five-year GSK license for virtual cell models

Biotechnology company Noetik has completed the first milestone under GSK's five-year license for its OCTO-VC virtual cell models

In January, global pharmaceutical company GSK obtained a non-exclusive license to use OCTO-VC in research on two types of cancer. On 26 August, Noetik reported that it had delivered and deployed model inference and fine-tuning capabilities for GSK, meeting the agreed testing criteria.

The five-year license covers research on non-small cell lung cancer and colorectal cancer. The agreement included $50 million upfront, milestone payments, and subsequent licensing fees. The parties defined the first milestone as the delivery and deployment of capabilities that allow GSK to run OCTO-VC inference and fine-tune the models using its own data.

OCTO-VC comprises virtual cell models that Noetik trained on data describing the spatial organization of human cells in tissue. The models use each cell's surroundings to predict hidden properties of tumor tissue, including gene activity, cell states, and interactions between the tumor and the immune system. Data on the spatial relationships between cells therefore allow the models to predict the biological state of the tissue.

According to Noetik, GSK teams use OCTO-VC for computational experiments on cells, stratification of patients into biological groups, and multimodal predictions from H&E images, which are biopsy images prepared using standard staining. GSK's AI director, Kim Branson, described the ability to fine-tune the models using the company's data as follows:

“They can be fine-tuned on a small amount of unique GSK data to produce accurate, specialized predictions.”

According to Noetik, the delivery and deployment of these capabilities met the agreed testing criteria, allowing the company to recognize completion of the license's first milestone.