We accelerate the journey from data to medicine: BenevolentAI

AI facilitates the creation of a next-generation workplace that thrives on smooth collaboration between enterprise system and individuals. Therefore, human resources are not made obsolete, but rather, their efforts are bolstered by emerging tech. In fact, AI provides organizations with the luxury of freeing up resources for higher-level tasks.

We introduce you to BenevolentAI, a leader across the world in developing and application of artificial intelligence (AI) for scientific innovation. The company quotes, “We aim to accelerate the journey from inventive ideas to medicines for patients by developing AI to generate new treatments for some of the world’s 8,000 untreated diseases.”

Benevolent’s mission is to utilize the power of AI to change drug discovery for good and bring in more advanced medicines to all the patients.

The vision is to drive transformational change through scalable technology solutions that result in a consistent pipeline of successful trials and new medicines for patients.

Journey from data to medicine

It’s a journey that starts with formulating a hypothesis that predicts the underlying cause of a disease and follows that through many rounds of experimentation and testing until the company validates that hypothesis. Then it begins the process of designing, synthesizing and developing a new compound to treat that disease for a specific group of patients that are most likely to respond to that medicine. This is a radically different approach to traditional drug discovery and helps uncover new knowledge to discover and develop more effective medicines, faster than ever before.

“We believe that unconventional thinking combined with purposeful technology can truly change the world.”

What the company does?

Benevolent opens up the power of scientific data to make more effective drugs for the people that need them.

“BenevolentAI integrates AI technologies at every step of the drug discovery process: from early discovery to late stage clinical development.”

The firm’s platform of computational and experimental technologies and processes is focused on broad quantities of mined and inferred biomedical data which is created and used by their top scientists, researchers, and technologists alongside working on the improvement of every step of the drug discovery process. “Our strength comes from this integrated, end-to-end approach, combined with a relentless pursuit of scientific and technological excellence,” says the company. 

How the company works?

Benevolent covers the expertise and interdisciplinary collaboration to create team effort in the entire whole drug discovery and development process.

“It’s an approach that we have in common with the world’s most successful innovative companies, and we believe it is helping us create a powerful business, with the conditions for innovation built in from the start. We believe our integrated approach and our state-of-the-art platform represents a blueprint for those who look to reimagine and accelerate the journey from data to better medicines.”

Benevolent also makes sure to address complicated diseases from varied angles. By breaking down the boundaries between technology and science, human and machine, there is focus and existence of innovation, quick experimentation and continuous feedback loops. 

Team efforts count

Building the right team means harnessing the right mix of broad biology, chemistry, informatics and drug discovery perspectives. It requires machine learning experts who can tackle the most demanding challenges, working constantly with scientists who develop and embrace new ideas.

The company’s strength comes from this integrated approach where it focuses on collective energy on a single disease with one common goal. Benevolent develops a deep understanding of that disease and tailor its machine learning models to reason specifically about the disease.

Values Benevolent live by

Patients are first: Patients should be treated with the right medicine quicker. There should exist a value that delivers the best when it comes to patients and their data and insights is always considered to be the core work of the company.

No boundaries: In order to bring in uniqueness, Benevolent crosses the boundaries between technology and science, human and machine.

Keep up with the solution: The company never looks back after deciding upon something. It does what it says and champions positivity, persistence, focuses on solutions, not problems.

On-time and accurate delivery: Benevolent uses data for decision-making and to deliver the right level of validation. And to innovate, it makes team efforts to take any level of risk.

Good move!

BenevolentAI, the leader in the creation and application of AI and machine learning to transform the way medicines are discovered and developed, makes an announcement of raising $90 million from Temasek, a Singapore-headquartered investment company. Raine Advisors acted as exclusive financial advisors to BenevolentAI.  

BenevolentAI was set up to bring in some improvement in the lives of patients suffering from diseases with no effective treatment. The Benevolent Platform® is used by scientists and technologists to find new ways to treat disease, improve the efficacy and minimize the development time and costs of new treatments.  

The funding will be used to scale and further develop the Benevolent Platform for drug discovery and development. BenevolentAI will continue to advance its growing pipeline of internal drug development programmes and collaborations with strategic partners across its key therapeutic areas. Most recently, BenevolentAI announced long-term collaborations with AstraZeneca and Novartis, which will generate meaningful revenues for BenevolentAI over a multi-year period.

Let’s show you what Joanna Shields, CEO of BenevolentAI said:

“We are pleased that Temasek has invested in us to support our mission to bring more effective medicines to the patients who need them. This year, we have demonstrated strong commercial and scientific progress and this funding will further scale our technology and support the development of our pipeline of potentially transformational medicines.”

The Benevolent Platform® is a leading computational and experimental drug discovery platform that enables scientists to uncover new ways to treat disease and personalize drugs for patients. It focuses on three key areas; target identification, molecular design and precision medicine, to better understand the underlying mechanisms of disease and to develop new treatments for the millions of patients who need them.

Backdrop of Joanna Shield, CEO

Joanna Shield is a tech veteran who has 25 years of experience building and scaling global firms which also includes Bebo, Facebook, Aol, Google, Real Networks and Efi. Before joining Benevolent, she took up a high role, she worked in UK government as Under Secretary of State and Minister for Internet Safety and Security, Digital Economy Adviser and was also CEO of TechCityUK.

Joanna is very passionate in whatever she does. She is now leading advocate for children’s rights and safety online and is the founder of the WeProtect Global Alliance.  

News and Events

Benevolent collaborated with Novartis Pharma AG in order to strengthen BenevolentAI’s technology platform to interrogate clinical trial and experimental data. The programme will be in charge of Precision Medicine Team within Novartis Global Drug Development.

It is agreed by the two companies that Benevolent will use its technology to enable good data-driven decisions to search new ways of treating disease and customize medicines for patients. The Benevolent Platform® absorbs molecular, clinical, pharmacological data and scientific literature, to derive contextual relationships in the data between genes, diseases, drugs and biological pathways leading to the proposal of novel/optimal drug targets. The platform helps scientists in developing and advance the right drug molecule for the respective patient population.

Joanna Shields, CEO of BenevolentAI said,

“We’re excited to be entering into this important collaboration with Novartis. 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. This initial project with Novartis in oncology will see the application of our AI and machine learning technology to stratify patients and gain a better understanding of patient and disease heterogeneity to more precisely target medicines for patients who need them.” 

“AI company developing and applying advanced technologies to accelerate the journey from data to  medicine.”

“We create and use AI technologies to transform the way medicines are discovered, developed, tested.”