Novartis and BenevolentAI sign AI oncology deal
Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis has united with BenevolentAI to aid in the discovery and development of new treatments.
BenevolentAI, a UK-headquartered artificial intelligence (AI) company, announced the collaboration agreement on Friday, September 6.
Novartis’ precision medicine team (which sits within the company’s global drug development unit) will lead the programme to investigate indications and responder groups for oncology assets currently in clinical development.
According to BenevolentAI, the company will apply its AI and machine learning technology to find new ways to treat disease and personalise drugs for patients.
Joanna Shields, CEO of BenevolentAI, said: “While the same drug may be prescribed for all patients diagnosed with a disease, often the underlying cause of the disease varies from patient to patient. Consequently, many experience little therapeutic benefit.”
Shield added that the project with Novartis in oncology will see the application of BenevolentAI’s technology to “stratify patients and gain a better understanding of patient and disease heterogeneity to more precisely target medicines for patients who need them”.
BenevolentAI’s platform takes in molecular, clinical, pharmacological data and scientific literature, to derive contextual relationships in the data between genes, diseases, drugs and biological pathways. This leads to the proposal of novel/optimal drug targets.
In May this year, BenevolentAI began collaborating with AstraZeneca to discover treatments for chronic kidney disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
The global healthcare AI market is expected to surpass $13 billion by 2025, according to market research company Global Market Insights, so it’s no surprise that big pharma is moving into the arena.
In January this year, Novartis joined forces with the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute to use AI for improving drug development, initially in the areas of multiple sclerosis, dermatology and rheumatology.
The five-year deal seeks to make drug development more efficient and targeted by transforming how datasets are analysed and interpreted.
But it’s not just big pharma that’s aware of the growing promise of AI—in July, the European Commission pledged €35 million ($39.2 million) to promote the development of analysis of health images for cancer diagnostics, based on artificial intelligence AI.
Through the Horizon 2020 programme, the biggest EU research and innovation programme ever, the European Commission is investing a total of €177 million on the ‘digital transformation of health and care’ and ‘trusted digital solutions and cybersecurity in health and care’.
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