EXAI - Exscientia: Too Much Pessimism

2024-06-10 16:32:01 ET

Summary

• Exscientia is using AI to improve drug discovery and address the low returns on investments in the pharmaceutical industry.
• While preclinical data generally looks promising, it is too early to know the overall impact of AI on drug discovery.
• While there is significant risk, Exscientia's low enterprise value and relatively integrated approach to AI-enabled drug discovery potentially provide an opportunity.

Exscientia plc ( EXAI ) is one of a number of companies using AI to try and address the low returns on drug discovery investments. While this could create enormous value, there are still questions around AI's overall impact on R&D efficiency, the ability of AI to develop truly novel therapies and the sustainability of any advantage provided by this approach. Exscientia hasn't benefited from AI hype to the same extent as companies like Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ( RXRX ) though, and hence could generate strong returns for shareholders if its approach begins to yield results or the company simply manages to gain investor mindshare.

Drug Discovery

Drug discovery generally involves a trial-and-error search process to find a molecule that will safely induce the desired biological effect in humans. Given the complexity of the human body and the enormous molecular search space, this is a slow and expensive process with high failure rates. For example, there is an estimated 10^60 possible molecular combinations with drug-like characteristics, making exploring even a tiny fraction of this space completely infeasible. A typical drug discovery project only has the budget and time to synthesize and assay fewer than 10,000 molecules.

Due to the limitations of current approaches to drug discovery, and the fact that much of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, drug discovery efforts have become challenged in recent decades. New drugs have a 96% failure rate from project inception to drug approval, and it costs roughly $1.8 billion and over 10 years to bring a new drug to market. As a result, the projected ROI in R&D for the top 12 global pharmaceutical companies has fallen to 1.8% and the risk-adjusted NPV of an asset is only around $10 million. This situation has contributed to only a trickle of new drugs reaching the market each year, with the FDA approving 42 drugs in 2019 ....

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