US pharmaceutical company AbbVie (NYSE:ABBV), and Iambic, a clinical-stage life sciences and technology company developing novel medicines through its AI-driven discovery and development platform, announced on Monday a multi-year collaboration to accelerate the discovery and development of small molecule therapies across immunology, neuroscience and oncology.

Using Iambic's AI platform, the partners aim to improve the efficiency and success of identifying promising new drug candidates.

In traditional small molecule discovery, scientists evaluate dozens of properties for each candidate individually. Iambic's molecular superintelligence platform is powered by Enchant and NeuralPLexer, technologies designed to optimise the full range of candidate properties simultaneously, increasing the chance of making better molecules while reducing drug discovery timelines.

The collaboration will use Enchant v3, Iambic's next-generation multimodal transformer model that combines biomedical data modalities from across the drug discovery process and enables many drug design hypotheses to be tested in parallel and at scale. Enchant v3 is trained on over 6,000 molecular properties.

Under the terms of the collaboration, Iambic will receive an upfront payment and is eligible to receive success-based milestone payments and tiered royalties on net sales from products generated from the collaboration.