AbbVie has signed a multi-year collaboration with Iambic, the San Diego company whose software designs small molecules. The pact covers immunology, neuroscience and oncology, and was announced on September 21. Within days, Iambic filed to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker IAM.
The companies did not disclose the financial terms. The structure includes an upfront payment, development and regulatory milestones, and tiered royalties if a product reaches the market. AbbVie will use Enchant, Iambic’s discovery engine, now in its third version.
Iambic says Enchant v3 was trained on 41 billion parameters spanning more than 6,000 molecular properties across 16 biomedical data types. The pitch is that it tunes many candidate properties at once instead of one at a time, which is how conventional discovery works. NVIDIA is an investor.
Iambic’s own pipeline gives the software a track record to sell. IAM1363, an oral HER2 inhibitor built to cross into the brain, is in Phase 1 for HER2-positive breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. A larger confirmatory study could follow as early as next year. Two preclinical candidates, IAM217 and IAM-C1, target breast and ovarian cancers.
Iambic already counts Takeda, Lundbeck, Revolution Medicines, Jazz Pharma and Bayer as partners. Adding AbbVie opens a large pharma channel across three of the biggest therapeutic areas.
Why it matters. AI drug discovery has struggled to prove that designed molecules survive human trials. Iambic is asking public investors to fund that proof, and its listing will be read as a verdict on whether the sector can be valued like a drug developer rather than a software vendor.
