AstraZeneca and AI-Powered Immune Mapping Company Immunai Sign Up To $85M IBD Target Agreement
Immunai has signed an agreement with AstraZeneca to develop a therapeutic target for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), marking a shift from their existing oncology-focused collaboration started in 2022. The deal is valued at up to $85 million and grants AstraZeneca exclusive rights to develop and commercialize therapies based on the newly identified target.
The target was discovered using Immunai’s Immunodynamics Engine (IDE), which applies machine learning to single-cell multi-omics data from its immune cell atlas, AMICA. The platform is designed to identify and prioritize immune-modulating targets by modeling immune function across disease states such as cancer, autoimmunity, and inflammatory conditions.
This agreement builds on the companies’ multi-year collaboration that began in 2022. In 2024, AstraZeneca committed $18 million for the initial phase of a partnership focused on optimizing oncology clinical trials using Immunai’s IDE and AMICA platforms. The effort targets key aspects of trial design and decision-making, including dose selection, mechanism of action analysis, patient stratification, and biomarker identification. The IDE platform integrates data from over 300,000 patient samples (as of 16th October, 2025; 100,000 in 2024) and combines public and proprietary multi-omic single-cell datasets to identify immune drivers and therapeutic hypotheses.
In March 2025, Immunai appointed Mikael Dolsten, M.D., Ph.D.—former Chief Scientific Officer and President of R&D at Pfizer—to its Board of Directors. Dolsten, who previously led the development of more than 35 approved drugs and vaccines, is expected to support Immunai’s immunology and oncology initiatives as the company scales its AI-powered discovery programs.
In April 2025, Immunai partnered with the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) to construct what they describe as the world’s largest single-cell dataset for real-world immunotherapy research. The dataset draws from 3,700 blood samples across 1,070 patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors in a nationwide study, and includes multi-omic profiling integrated into the AMICA atlas. The goal is to uncover molecular correlates of immune response and resistance to guide biomarker development and clinical trial design through the IDE platform.
Further extending its reach into academia, Immunai launched the Grand Collaboration Initiative for Single-Cell Immune Profiling in August 2025, offering free multi-omic sequencing for up to 1,000 human samples from non-commercial academic studies (deadline closed on October 1st, collaborators will be announced in November). Selected datasets will be integrated into AMICA to expand comparative immune modeling across cancer, autoimmunity, and immunotherapy contexts.
Alongside AstraZeneca, Teva has emerged as a second major partner validating Immunai’s platform across therapeutic areas. Their multi-year collaboration, announced in early 2024, applies AMICA and IDE to support trial optimization in both oncology and immunology.
Topic: Industry Movers
