Ropes & Gray Represents Novo Nordisk in AI-Based Cardiometabolic Drug Discovery Collaboration with Valo Health Worth Up to $2.7 Billion

Ropes & Gray advised Novo Nordisk in a collaboration with Valo Health to discover and develop novel treatments for cardiometabolic diseases such as heart attack, stroke and diabetes using real-world patient data and artificial intelligence machine learning models to accelerate the process of discovering and developing new small molecule therapies. The deal was announced on September 25.

Under the collaboration Novo Nordisk has licensed three preclinical drug discovery programs in cardiovascular diseases developed by using Valo’s computational platform and human tissue modeling technology. Valo will receive an upfront payment and potential near-term milestone payments of $60 million. Valo is also eligible to receive milestone payments for up to 11 programs, totaling up to $2.7 billion, plus research and development funding and potential royalty payments.

The Ropes & Gray team included life sciences licensing partner Hannah England and life sciences licensing associate Ian Nilsen.