Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. announced the formation of a multiyear strategic partnership. This agreement will combine Valo's Opal Computational Platform with Charles River's drug discovery and development capabilities to offer a new transformative, AI-enabled drug discovery and development platform. The partnership's combined offerings will utilize Valo's Opal Platform for small molecule development, which leverages a “closed-loop” in silico-experimental platform that rapidly iterates using program data to identify novel compounds, and leverages Charles River's capabilities in all aspects of discovery optimization, including medicinal chemistry, ADME, biology, pharmacology, and ultimately safety testing and IND submission.

The combination of Valo's scientific innovation and deep technological expertise with Charles River's end-to-end portfolio and industry-leading scientific bench has the potential to significantly accelerate a client's discovery and development efforts by integrating data and compute to streamline and de-risk experimental science, enabling a faster and more effective process from de novo molecule design through lead optimization.