Merck and Mayo Clinic partner to accelerate AI-driven drug discovery

Merck and Mayo Clinic have entered a strategic partnership where they will utilize artificial intelligence (AI) for drug research and development. Details of the partnership are reported in a press release.

The goal of this action is to broaden understanding of diseases, enhance personalized medicine, and aid early interventions. The agreement will first center on neurology, gastroenterology, and dermatology. The organizations will unite Mayo Clinic's Platform architecture and their clinical and genomic datasets “including AI and machine learning (ML)-enabled discovery spanning computational and spatial biology.”

Merck will be given direct access to Mayo Clinic’s “de-identified clinical and multimodal data sets, registries and biorepositories, advanced AI tools and analytics, and the ability to scale solutions” via the Mayo Clinic Platform Orchestrate. Furthermore, Merck will use this data to validate AI tools and “help translate research insights into discovery and development strategies.”