Today we announced a major milestone in the shape of a long-term strategic collaboration with AstraZeneca.
This partnership combines BenevolentAI’s expertise in AI and machine learning to identify novel insights from scientific data with AstraZeneca’s excellence in R&D to identify new targets in two therapeutic areas of huge unmet need: Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD).
The collaboration is important for BenevolentAI as it comes with an upfront payment, development milestone payments and tiered royalties on future revenues. But, more importantly, the spirit of this deal is different. Rather than a standard service provision agreement, this deal represents a true partnership: combining AstraZeneca’s world-leading disease area expertise and large diverse datasets together with our machine learning discovery and AI-enabled target ID capabilities.
AstraZeneca and BenevolentAI will work side by side in joint multidisciplinary teams, integrating working practices across data science, machine learning, respiratory and cardiovascular R&D, Target ID and precision medicine to break down traditional drug discovery boundaries and enable more efficient data-driven decision making. The combined AstraZeneca/BenevolentAI teams will incorporate proprietary data, tailor approaches to using that data, jointly interpret the results and then work together to identify targets that we hope will lead to new medicines.
Partnerships aren’t forged on paper. In all our interactions to date, AstraZeneca has proven to be open, progressive and committed to working together. Both companies share a common purpose and mindset in unlocking the power of scientific data to make more effective drugs for the people that need them and I’m incredibly excited to combine forces with them on targeting two critical disease areas that affect the lives of millions of people.
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