Merck and Mayo Clinic Partner on AI-Enabled Drug Discovery Using Clinical Data

Merck & Co (known as MSD outside the US and Canada) and Mayo Clinic announced a research and development agreement on Tuesday that will allow the pharmaceutical company to apply artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to drug discovery and development by tapping Mayo Clinic's clinical and genomic datasets. Mayo Clinic has described this as its first strategic collaboration of this scale with a global biopharmaceutical company.

The collaboration integrates Mayo Clinic's Platform architecture with Merck's AI-enabled virtual cell technologies to enhance disease understanding, improve target identification, and drive early development decisions. The agreement 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 program.

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 Mayo Clinic Platform architecture covers de-identified laboratory results, medical imaging, clinical notes, molecular data, registries, and biorepositories, plus tools to interrogate the data, including AI tools and analytics.

The chairman and CEO stated that by working with Mayo Clinic, the company aims to integrate high-quality clinical data and AI-enabled insights into discovery research to improve target identification and, ultimately, the probability of success for programs. The CEO noted that new cutting-edge technologies are enhancing the ability to innovate with the potential to bring important new therapies to patients faster.

The president and CEO of Mayo Clinic stated the collaboration aims to speed innovative breakthroughs to patients and redefine drug development. The executive said that by combining Mayo Clinic Platform's de-identified data, clinical expertise and Platform technology with Merck's world-class research and development capabilities, the organizations are poised to speed innovative breakthroughs to patients and redefine drug development.

The partnership's initial focus will be on therapies in three therapeutic areas: dermatology (atopic dermatitis), neurology (multiple sclerosis), and gastroenterology (inflammatory bowel disease). An executive from Merck's enterprise strategy division said the strategy was to look at the entire data set and identify where there's opportunity, where there's gaps in coverage that are aligned with Merck's core areas. They arrived at five areas that way, then ultimately narrowed it to these final three.

An executive from Merck noted that Mayo has a really unique wealth of de-identified clinical, molecular multimodal data sets, and these are not readily available in the healthcare landscape, at least in a really clean and highly curated way. Having access to high-quality, reliable datasets suitable for machine learning and the creation of good models has been identified as critical for AI-enabled drug discovery.

The chief operating officer for the Mayo Clinic Platform described the platform concept as a deliberate departure from healthcare's traditional approach. The whole platform concept was born out of the CEO looking at other industries and how they've embodied platform thinking, which is shared resources, collaborative models, modular thinking. Healthcare has been fairly against this, because there's proprietary contracts, proprietary data sources, proprietary everything.

The executive stated that the Mayo Clinic Platform allows researchers to move beyond narrow data sets focused on specific patient cohorts and gain a bigger-picture understanding of disease progression. That includes deep analysis of clinical notes and integration of clinical data, omics data, and waveform data. All of the clinical data and omics data and waveform data all together will give a view on disease progression unlike any time in history, and AI is just an accelerant toward that.

For Merck, the Mayo Clinic partnership is part of a broader AI adoption strategy. The company recently partnered with Nvidia on a small-molecule drug discovery model called KERMT, and previously created a genomics-focused foundation model called TEDDY. Merck has also been integrating AI into regulatory responses, supply chain operations, forecasting, and commercial operations. An executive noted that the company has a pretty end-to-end approach going on with technology and AI, and while proud of the progress made, understands that there's a whole bunch more to do.

The collaboration builds on a relationship between Merck and Mayo Clinic that dates back to the 1940s, but the structure of this partnership shows a new model for how these institutions work together.