BenevolentAI has acquired a drug discovery and development facility on the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge (UK) for an undisclosed amount.

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 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. 

BenevolentAI’s artificial intelligence technology has successfully generated novel drug candidates to treat a range of complex and previously untreatable diseases. Most notably, their breakthrough in ALS in 2017 produced positive results for their AI derived invention, and resulted in significant license agreements with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

Ken Mulvany, founder and chairman of BenevolentAI, said, “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 organization 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.”