Valo is a new type of technology company, uniting human and machine intelligence aiming to accelerate the creation of life-changing cures.

Novo Nordisk on Wednesday announced that it will expand a 2023 contract with Boston biotech Valo Health to develop novel treatments for obesity, type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic conditions.The expanded deal’s initial consideration involves a total of $190 million in an upfront payment, equity investment and milestones. The partners will be able to work collaboratively on up to 20 drug programs for which milestone payments could reach around $4.6 billion, in addition to R&D funding and potential royalties.Novo and Valo first entered into their partnership in September 2023. At the time, the obesity leader paid $60 million upfront and pledged up to $2.7 billion for the opportunity to collaborate on 11 cardiometabolic programs. At the center of the collaboration is Valo’s AI-enabled preclinical capabilities, which allow the biotech to identify and validate druggable targets, as well as design and screen potentially therapeutic molecules against these targets.Valo says its preclinical edge comes from its proprietary computational platform Opal, which leverages AI models built using high-quality human data. What the biotech calls its “integrated approach” to drug discovery and development generates and uses data at every stage of the process—from disease and target discovery through regulatory approval—producing a “self-reinforcing, active learning system” that improves its performance with each experiment, the company says on its website.Valo claims its human-centric data library is “the largest and densest in the world,” and that models developed using these data can help Valo and its partners predict disease progression “and how a drug will perform before it even touches a person.”For Novo, Valo’s approach appears to be working well. Pharma CSO Marcus Schindler said in a statement on Wednesday that the company is “very pleased with the progress” it has seen under the Valo partnership, leading to its decision to expand the agreement