BenevolentAI, one of the world’s largest private AI companies, has announced that it has acquired a state-of-the-art drug discovery and development facility on the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge (UK) for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition creates a unique AI-enabled research centre that can radically reduce the time it takes for drug candidates to enter clinical testing and deliver significantly higher success rates in treating or curing disease.
The acquisition marks the first time an AI company will be able to work across the entire drug development process ‘end-to-end’ from drug discovery to late stage clinical development.
The acquired drug discovery and development facility has a large scientific team with deep expertise in assay development and screening, medicinal and synthetic chemistry, drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, pharmacology and clinical development. The Cambridge team will integrate with BenevolentAI’s world class drug discovery scientists, using AI to rapidly advance the right drugs to the right patients.
BenevolentAI’s artificial intelligence technology has successfully generated novel drug candidates to treat a range of complex and previously untreatable diseases. The company has rapidly expanded its drug research pipeline to include 19 programmes since establishing its drug development subsidiary BenevolentBio less than 2 years ago.
Ken Mulvany, Founder and Chairman of BenevolentAI, commented: “We have built an artificial intelligence technology that can read and understand the world’s biomedical information, then perform complex reasoning to inform us of things about disease never before understood. This enables us to discover new medicines like no other organisation and drive cures for diseases that were previously untreatable.
The acquisition has expanded our scale and capability overnight and created something that previously did not exist – an AI company truly integrated across every stage of the drug development process.”
BenevolentAI is the global leader in the development and application of AI for scientific innovation. It is the largest private AI company in Europe and one of the world’s top five private AI companies.
The company has built a proprietary AI technology platform that ingests and processes knowledge from any source of vast complex scientific data and then analyses, reasons and extracts knowledge. The technology enables BenevolentAI to generate new scientific insights very quickly at a huge scale.
In the first instance, BenevolentAI has applied its technology to accelerate the discovery of new medicines creating the world’s richest bioscience knowledge graph containing well over 1bn meaningful relationships specific to drug discovery. The technology enables a completely unique understanding of disease and can deliver significantly higher success rates in discovering new medicines and potential cures for disease.
The company has made significant progress in accelerating drug development, including the initiation of 19 validated drug research programmes, including a breakthrough in ALS in 2017, where positive results for its AI-derived invention was announced. BenevolentAI has entered into significant license agreements with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and began its first Phase IIb clinical study in 2017.
Whilst the pharmaceutical sector is an area of tremendous opportunity, there is the also the opportunity to apply its technology to other science-based industries underpinning many of the world’s most valuable markets such as advanced materials, agriculture, nutraceuticals and animal health. Initially, BenevolentAI will start its exploration into other scientific verticals by looking at how its technology can be applied to the multi-billion-dollar energy storage market.
