AZ to accelerate drug discovery with BenevolentAI partnership

AstraZeneca has announced a collaboration with Benevolent AI in order to use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to discover potential new drugs for chronic kidney disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.The two companies will create a team of scientists that will work side-by-side to combine AstraZeneca’s genomics, chemistry and clinical data with BenevolentAI’s target identification platform and biomedical knowledge graph – a network of contextualised scientific data such as genes, proteins, diseases and compounds, and the relationship between them. Benevolent AI’s machine learning capabilities systematically analyses data to find connections between facts, and AI-based reasoning is used to extrapolate previously unknown connections. The companies will use the technology to interpret the results to understand the underlying mechanisms of these complex diseases and more quickly identify new potential drug targets.