The Japan Times - Owkin Launches K Pro: The First Agentic AI Co-Pilot for Biopharma Powered by Biological Reasoning Models

PARIS, FRANCE, GB / ACCESS Newswire / October 16, 2025 / Owkin today announces the launch of K Pro, its co-pilot bringing advanced agentic AI to biomedical research and drug development. K Pro helps pharmaceutical companies and biotechs make smarter decisions across the discovery and development pipeline, increase clinical success rates, and deliver decision-grade, data-driven biological insights fast enough to change program trajectories.

Built on a decade of Owkin's AI innovation and in close collaboration with leading academic and industry partners, K Pro is a scientist-first co-pilot, accessible to both researchers and executives. Through natural language interaction, users can ask complex biological questions and receive actionable, clinically relevant answers, unifying fragmented workflows into an insight-driven research experience.

At its core, K Pro integrates Owkin Zero, a fine-tuned biological LLM that performs biological reasoning with higher performance than other leading LLMs (read the full paper). Leveraging high-quality, multimodal biomedical datasets, K Pro gives researchers access to one of the deepest, curated, AI-ready multimodal oncology datasets available (including MOSAIC). Biopharma and academic clients can securely upload their proprietary datasets to leverage K Pro's advanced AI reasoning and data analysis.

Thomas Clozel, MD, Owkin Co-founder and CEO, said: "K Pro brings us closer to intelligence that evolves with the complexity of biology. By combining advanced biological reasoning with an agentic co-pilot architecture, it represents a key step towards our mission of achieving Biological Artificial Super Intelligence (BASI), AI capable of modelling and engineering biology beyond what humans are capable of to deliver transformative therapies to patients faster."

K Pro has already accelerated internal drug target identification by 70% (from 12+ months to 3 months); built an IND-ready asset positioning strategy in hours instead of months of traditional analysis; and written a specialist review in one day, which was later published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

K Pro builds upon Owkin's proven approach to agentic AI biomedical discovery, validated through collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb and Sanofi.

Ben Mellows, managing director at the biotech company Micregen, used Owkin K to formulate his investor pitch and shared his experience: "We wanted to get our product pitch across to investors. That process could take weeks to work through with all of our experts, but Owkin K really helped. It assimilated all the information we provided evidencing how our regenerative stem cell-derived platform and products could have a major impact on healthcare and delivered a clear story tailored to investors from different backgrounds. The literature set is huge. I would say the task would have been nearly impossible to achieve at the scale that Owkin K handled in just a few work sessions."

Owkin's AI has already delivered results for pharmaceutical clients, including: preventing Phase 2 clinical trial futility by identifying high-risk combination therapy populations; discovering new multimodal disease endotypes; reducing trial duration by three years (35%) by identifying the right patient segment to inform enrolment and identifying novel oncology targets.

About Owkin:
Owkin is an AI company on a mission to solve the complexity of biology. It is building the first Biology Super Intelligence (BASI) by combining powerful biological large language models, multimodal patient data, and agentic software. At the heart of this system is Owkin K, an AI co-pilot and its new LLM finetuned on biology called Owkin Zero, used by researchers, clinicians, and drug developers to better understand biology, validate scientific hypotheses, and deliver better diagnostics and therapies faster.

About the State of Agentic AI in Biopharma Report:
To ensure K Pro addresses the real-world challenges facing pharma, Owkin partnered with STAT Brand Studio to produce the State of the Nation report, surveying over 200 pharma executives (full report here). Nearly half of respondents identified overcoming data challenges as the area where agentic AI could deliver the greatest value. Early discovery, clinical trial optimisation, and translational research were also highlighted as top priorities, underscoring the immediate need for agentic AI solutions that translate complex biomedical data into actionable insights.

SOURCE: Owkin

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

T.Ikeda--JT