BenevolentAI has announced it has acquired a drug discovery and development facility in Cambridge, to quicken its programme developments with AI.
The acquisition will allow the company to create an AI-enabled research centre, which aims to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for drug candidates to being clinical testing as well as delivering much higher success rates in treating or curing diseases.
By acquiring the development facility it will allow BenevolentAI to work across the full drug development process, end-to-end for the first time from drug discovery to late stage clinical development. The acquisition will see the company and scientists at the centre working together using AI to develop its drug programmes into a clinic more quickly at a much greater scale.
“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,” Ken Mulvany, Founder and Chairman of BenevolentAI, said.
BenevolentAI has already expanded its research to 19 programmes and the acquisition intends to expand its current capabilities, to enable more efficient and accurate results. Furthermore, the use of AI will allow the company to discover more medicines that it hasn’t yet found and increase cures for untreatable illnesses.
The facility that has been acquired already has a large scientific team, therefore this will allow BenevolentAI to utilise the expertise of the workers there already to develop programmes. Scientists at the facility will aid development in areas such as pharmacokinetics, pharmacology and clinical developments.
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“We have built an artificial intelligence technology that can read and understand the world’s biomedical information, then perform complex reasoning, to tell us things about disease never understood before. This enables us to discover new medicines like no other organisation and drive cures for diseases that were previously untreatable.”
The acquisition has been confirmed, but the amount has not been disclosed.
