Noetik Achieves First Milestone in Landmark GSK Collaboration

Noetik has announced the achievement of its first near-term milestone under the five-year licensing agreement with GSK, which was initially disclosed in January 2026. This agreement includes $50 million in upfront capital and provisions for near-term milestone payments. The successful milestone was achieved through the delivery and deployment of the OCTO-VC model inference and fine-tuning capabilities, thereby meeting the established testing criteria.

According to Ron Alfa, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and Co-founder of Noetik, “We built OCTO-VC to close the gap between science that is promising in the lab and therapeutics with the potential to work in patients.” He added, “AI approaches have come a long way in enabling molecular design for early stage drug discovery. We founded Noetik to extend the gains of AI to fundamental challenges in biology and patient selection, for better therapeutic decisions. The momentum we’re seeing now is incredible.”

The OCTO-VC models developed by Noetik are biological foundation models trained on an extensive dataset of hundreds of millions of spatially resolved human cells, making it a significant resource in oncology. These models can simulate gene expression, cell states, and tumor-immune interactions, allowing GSK researchers to generate data for hypothesis exploration quickly, thereby accelerating their learning cycles.

Kim Branson, Chief AI Officer at GSK, remarked, “This milestone demonstrates that Noetik’s models are truly foundational and using a small amount of GSK’s unique data can be fine-tuned to generate high accuracy and specific predictions.” He continued, “The integration of these models into GSK’s learning system deepens our understanding of disease mechanism and accelerates our ability to potentially identify new targets for medicine development. The use of this tech enables us to accelerate the discovery and development of potential new medicines which ultimately means we can bring innovative treatments to patients faster.”

GSK's teams are leveraging the OCTO-VC models to conduct virtual cell experiments, explore patient stratification, and enhance their H&E data with multi-modal predictions. This milestone underscores the licensing structure that Noetik and GSK established earlier: a subscription-based framework that allows GSK to pay upfront capital and ongoing fees for access to Noetik's models, rather than acquiring individual drug candidates.

Shafique Virani, M.D., Chief Business Officer of Noetik, expressed optimism about the partnership, stating, “We’re pleased that the partnership is producing results, and we're looking forward to hitting additional milestones with GSK.”

About Noetik: NOETIK is an AI company focused on creating foundation models of human biology aimed at redefining clinical outcomes in oncology. By utilizing the largest proprietary multimodal spatial oncology dataset, NOETIK's OCTO foundation models align therapeutic targets with patient populations, facilitate novel target discovery, and predict clinical efficacy. Through partnerships with clinical developers and pharmaceutical firms like GSK, NOETIK aims to establish the AI infrastructure necessary for translational medicine and co-develop therapeutics with a higher likelihood of clinical success. For more information on NOETIK, visit https://www.noetik.ai.