One of the biggest AI firms acquires Cambridge drug research facility

BenevolentAI, one of the world’s largest private AI companies, has today (February 23) acquired a drug discovery and development facility on the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge 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.

The company has rapidly expanded its drug research pipeline to include 19 programmes since establishing its drug development subsidiary BenevolentBio less than two 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 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 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.”