# Immunai Signs Discovery Deal With Boehringer Ingelheim > Source: > Published: 2026-06-25 16:51:23.604675+00:00 ### What happened **Immunai** announced a discovery collaboration with **Boehringer Ingelheim** valued at up to **$15 million** that will run through **2027**, the companies said in a press release distributed via WebWire and reported by FierceBiotech and The Jerusalem Post. Per those sources, the partnership will apply Immunai's **single-cell AI platform** to build a cross-disease data foundation from thousands of patient samples and to nominate T-cell targets relevant to both immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases. The agreement calls for downstream functional perturbation and wet-lab validation of prioritized targets at Immunai's New York laboratory, according to FierceBiotech. ### Technical details FierceBiotech reported that Immunai will analyze T cells across cancer and autoimmune cohorts using its single-cell datasets, then apply functional assays to assess target relevance before negotiating any expanded collaboration. FierceBiotech noted that Immunai's internal database includes **50,000 single-cell samples** and that this is the company's third major pharma pact so far in 2026, following a collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb (January 2026) and an expanded collaboration with AstraZeneca (May 2026), per the press release. Immunai has raised close to **$270 million** in funding to date and has a team of over 170 experts (WebWire). ### Key quotes (press release) Noam Solomon, Ph.D., CEO of Immunai, stated: "This collaboration brings together large-scale, clinically grounded data, translational science and functional validation to support broad target discovery across both fields. By taking an unbiased approach across thousands of patient samples, we hope to uncover biological insights and therapeutic opportunities that would otherwise remain hidden." Lamine Mbow, Ph.D., Global Head of Discovery Research at Boehringer Ingelheim, stated: "Across oncology and inflammatory/autoimmune diseases, patients continue to face serious unmet medical need, and too many still lack treatment options that can meaningfully change the course of disease." ### Editorial analysis - technical context Combining large-scale single-cell atlases with targeted functional perturbation is an increasingly common approach for deconvolving immune-cell heterogeneity into druggable targets. For practitioners, that pattern implies emphasis on data harmonization, batch-correction, robust cell-state annotation, and orthogonal functional readouts to move from correlative signals to causal target hypotheses. T-cell dysfunction is relevant across both oncology and autoimmune settings, which makes a cross-disease dataset particularly valuable. ### Industry context Industry reporting frames this deal as part of a wider trend of Big Pharma partnering with AI-driven immunology startups to accelerate target discovery. FierceBiotech reports this is Immunai's third such pact in 2026, illustrating growing commercial interest in single-cell-first target pipelines. Such collaborations typically trade near-term discovery funding and access to translational expertise for the startup's data and analytical capabilities. ### What to watch Monitor whether the collaboration produces prioritized target nominations that progress into defined drug programs, the timeline and readouts from Immunai's functional perturbation work, and any extensions or milestone-triggered payments beyond the initial **$15 million** term through **2027** (FierceBiotech). Publication of methods or datasets and any joint scientific disclosures would signal the translational maturity of the nominated targets. ## Scoring Rationale A $15 million milestone-linked discovery deal between Immunai and Boehringer Ingelheim is commercially solid and validates single-cell AI for cross-indication target discovery, but modest in scale relative to the broader pharma-AI partnership landscape. The cross-disease T-cell design is technically interesting, and this is Immunai's third major pact in 2026, but the near-term deliverables are discovery-stage nominations rather than clinical programs. Practice interview problems based on real data 1,625 SQL & Python problems across 15 industry datasets — the exact type of data you work with. [Try 250 free problems](/problems)