Roivant Sciences has agreed to acquire Silicon Therapeutics for $450 million in Roivant equity, with additional potential regulatory and commercial milestone payments.

The acquisition of Silicon Therapeutics bolsters Roivant’s targeted protein degradation platform. That platform will be powered by VantAI’s advanced machine learning models trained on proprietary degrader-specific experimental data and by Silicon Therapeutics’ proprietary computational physics capabilities, which help address many of the modality-specific challenges of degrader design and optimization. Integrating Silicon Therapeutics and VantAI will enable Roivant to distinctively capture the power of both computational physics and machine learning-based approaches to drug design; for instance, by incorporating proprietary computational physics simulations as training data for VantAI’s degrader-specific deep learning models.

“We are delighted to integrate Silicon Therapeutics into Roivant as we continue to expand our capabilities in computationally-powered drug discovery,” said Matt Gline, chief executive officer of Roivant Sciences. “We intend to leverage our established development apparatus as we rapidly advance promising compounds from our drug discovery engine into clinical studies.”

“Silicon Therapeutics was founded with a vision of transforming the pharmaceutical industry through use of technology,” said Lanny Sun, co-founder and chief executive officer of Silicon Therapeutics. “By joining forces with Roivant, we can significantly accelerate making this vision a reality. Roivant has an impressive track record in clinical execution and building and deploying technology platforms to power pharmaceutical research, development and commercialization.”