− Collaboration is valued at up to$2Bwith upfront consideration of$30M−
− Alliance pairs Alnylam’s RNAi platform and 20+ years of proprietary data with Inceptive’s foundation models and AI expertise to catalyze progress beyond rational drug design –
− Partnership designed to accelerate timelines and unlock innovative oligonucleotide designs −
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.&PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun. 3, 2026-- Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALNY), the leading RNAi therapeutics company, and Inceptive Nucleics, Inc., which builds foundation models of life, today announced a strategic collaboration agreement to increase the pace of therapeutic innovation. The collaboration is valued at up to$2Bwith upfront consideration of$30M, including cash and the purchase of Inceptive equity. Inceptive is eligible to receive additional payments based on the achievement of preclinical, regulatory, and commercial sales milestones.
By integrating Inceptive’s generative AI models with Alnylam’s R&D engine,Alnylamaims to accelerate the discovery of novel RNAi therapeutics as it advances ambitious pipeline expansion goals as part of its Alnylam2030 strategy.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Inceptive to push the boundaries of what is possible in the discovery of RNAi medicines,” saidYvonne Greenstreet, M.D., Chief Executive Officer ofAlnylam. “Inceptive stands apart as one of the most visionary companies working at the intersection of AI and biology. It is led by pioneers of the AI revolution and driven by an ambitious mission to fundamentally reinvent how RNA medicines are designed. Together, we have an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate the creation of transformative medicines with a speed, ingenuity, and sophistication that simply has not been possible before.”
Inceptive’s foundation model learns the patterns underlying biology and hence can adapt to diverse therapeutic modalities without retraining. In joint exploratory work, the model achieved exceptional performance within weeks, uncovering meaningful biological insights from relatively small datasets to characterize siRNA molecules, the active ingredient in RNAi therapeutics.
"Most drug design still works through a process of trial and error, testing thousands of molecules and hoping something sticks,” said Jakob Uszkoreit, Inceptive co-founder and CEO. “Inceptive was built on a different premise: that life follows rules of such complexity that only AI can learn them. Alnylam’s breakthrough platform and scientific vision are an ideal match for AI. Together, we’re not just accelerating drug discovery; we’re changing the way we understand and improve life.”
Generalizable Platforms Open New Therapeutic Design Spaces
The collaboration pairs Alnylam’s RNAi leadership with Inceptive’s foundation models and AI expertise to catalyze and accelerate progress in nucleic-acid based drug design. Inceptive focuses on developing models for sequence-based medicines such as RNAi therapeutics, which were pioneered byAlnylam.
-
Alnylam’s platform: An R&D engine that has produced six approved drugs, backed by 20+ years of proprietary siRNA data.
-
Inceptive’s foundation models of life: AI models for sequence-based medicines that generalize across programs and continuously improve.
The collaboration seeks to advance siRNA design, by modeling target mRNAs and jointly exploring sequence space and novel chemical modifications to enhance potency and efficacy, and by predicting top-performing therapeutic candidates in preclinical models for further development byAlnylam. The goal is to helpAlnylamprioritize the most promising molecules and improve experimental productivity.
By combining Alnylam’s deep biological expertise with Inceptive’s frontier models, the alliance advances Alnylam’s ambition to unlock new therapeutic innovation through frontier AI. The collaboration givesAlnylamaccess to Inceptive’s AI expertise and talent, including CEOJakob Uszkoreit, co-inventor of the Transformer architecture (i.e., the “T” in ChatGPT), and pioneers of scalable, AI-enabled wet-lab training data generation methods.
About Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
Alnylam(Nasdaq: ALNY) is a leading global biopharmaceutical company and the pioneer of the RNA interference (RNAi) revolution. The Company is focused on developing transformative therapies with the potential to prevent, halt, or reverse disease. For more than two decades,Alnylamhas advanced the Nobel-Prize-winning science of RNAi, delivering critical breakthroughs and six approved medicines.Alnylamhas medicines available in more than 70 countries and a rapidly expanding and robust pipeline, in addition to consistently being recognized as an exceptional workplace and socially responsible organization. The Company is executing on its Alnylam2030 strategy to accelerate innovation and scale impact to transform human health.
About Inceptive
Inceptive builds AI foundation models of life that extrapolate from data to design breakthrough biological medicines beyond the reach of nature and traditional drug discovery. The company’s antedisciplinary team of AI researchers, biochemists, and engineers trains models on diverse biological data and designs experiments to generate missing training data at unprecedented scale. Inceptive partners with leading drugmakers to customize molecule-design models for discovery of sequence-based medicines such as siRNA, ASOs, peptides, and mRNA for applications such as in-vivo cell therapies. Founded in 2021 and backed by a16z, NVIDIA, S32 and Obvious, Inceptive is headquartered in Palo Alto with offices in Berlin and Zurich.