Merck and Mayo Clinic Partner on AI-Driven Drug Discovery Collaboration

Merck and Mayo Clinic announced Wednesday a research and development agreement to leverage artificial intelligence and advanced analytics for drug discovery and development. This marks Mayo Clinic's first strategic collaboration of this scale with a global biopharmaceutical company.

The collaboration will combine Mayo Clinic's Platform architecture and clinical-genomic datasets with Merck's virtual cell technologies to improve target identification, drive early development decisions, and enhance disease understanding. It gives Merck direct access to de-identified clinical and multimodal datasets, registries, biorepositories, advanced AI tools, analytics, and the ability to scale solutions through the new Mayo Clinic Platform_Orchestrate programme.

Through Mayo Clinic Platform_Orchestrate, Merck will gain access to de-identified clinical and multimodal data sets, including laboratory results, medical imaging, clinical notes and molecular data. Merck will use Mayo Clinic's diverse multimodal data, including medical imaging, laboratory results, molecular data, and clinical notes, to validate AI models and inform research insights for discovery and development strategies.

The chairman and CEO stated: "By working with Mayo Clinic, we aim to integrate high-quality clinical data and AI-enabled insights into discovery research to improve target identification and, ultimately, the probability of success for our programmes."

The president and CEO of Mayo Clinic said: "By combining Mayo Clinic Platform's de-identified data, clinical expertise and Platform technology with Merck's world-class research and development capabilities, we are poised to speed innovative breakthroughs to patients and redefine drug development. This collaboration represents a new present and future for healthcare—one where platform-based collaboration leads to more answers, more cures and better outcomes for patients worldwide."

The partnership will initially focus on three therapeutic areas: inflammatory bowel disease, atopic dermatitis, and multiple sclerosis. These areas were selected as ones where advanced analytics and multimodal approaches could potentially advance the development of more effective and tailored therapies.

The agreement builds on Merck's broader investments in AI/ML-enabled discovery across computational biology, AI foundation models and real-world data analysis. Having access to high-quality, reliable datasets suitable for machine learning and the creation of good models has been identified as an obstacle to reaping the rewards promised by the application of AI to the drug discovery process.