Inside BenevolentAI

It is estimated that 9,000 untreated diseases and 300 million people suffer from rare diseases with little hope of effective or life-saving treatment. UK-founded BenevolentAI, established in 2013, aims to change this and is the global leader in the development and application of artificial intelligence (AI) for scientific innovation.

BenevolentAI combines the power of computational medicine and advanced AI with the principles of open systems and cloud computing to transform the way drugs are designed, developed, tested and brought to market.  The company has developed the ‘Benevolent Platform’, the world’s only end-to-end computational and experimental platform for drug discovery that spans data ingestion to clinical development.

BenevolentAI does not see economic viability as a barrier. It develops the medicine that patients need and is a game-changer for drug discovery and development. It’s integrated approach and its state-of-the-art platform represents a blueprint for those who look to reimagine and accelerate the journey from data to better medicines.

BenevolentAI applies AI to create:

More effective drugs

BenevolentAI works with major pharmaceutical groups to license drugs, while also partnering with charities to develop easily transportable medicines for rare diseases.To do this, the Benevolent Platform™ focuses on four key areas of drug discovery and development:

Knowledge and Reasoning – a comprehensive bioscience knowledge graph, capable of ingesting any relevant structured and unstructured data. This gives scientists a large number of high quality ideas to explore, more quickly than via traditional research methods.

Target Identification – programmes augment the deep expertise of scientists with computational and experimental technologies and processes designed to counter bias. This enables scientists to determine the right mechanism to modulate, the best targets and how patients may respond to treatment.

Molecular Design – interdisciplinary squads work in fast, iterative experimental cycles throughout target identification and lead optimisation, building on new and existing experimental data from all stages of drug development, to ensure the drug has the greatest chance of efficacy in patients.

Precision Medicine – new machine learning methods to understand patient endotypes and their response, fundamentally changing the ability to intervene in diseases at the right time.

“By using AI and machine learning to look at massive

amounts of data, we can bring new insights into what diseases actually are, and how we can think about treating them. ”

— Bryn, Director of Exploratory Research, London

Better data decision making

BenevolentAI seeks to improve patient’s lives by applying technology designed to generate better data decision making. This results in lower drug development costs, decrease failure rates and increased speed at which medicines are generated.  

Strong health information systems are the foundation of informed decision-making and big data is one of the most important tools in healthcare automation. Machine learning systematically analyses data to find connections between facts, and AI-based reasoning is used to extrapolate previously unknown connections. The vast amount of data available to research scientists is growing exponentially each year and BenevolentAI’s leading AI and machine learning capabilities can unlock the potential of this wealth of data to improve understanding of complex disease biology and identify new targets that could treat debilitating diseases.