BenevolentAI, a leading clinical-stage AI drug discovery company, has expanded its AI-driven drug discovery collaboration with AstraZeneca, doubling the number of disease areas being explored through the partnership. 

The expansion builds on the collaboration initiated in 2019 and adds systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and heart failure (HF) to ongoing work to identify multiple novel targets in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).

The collaboration has already achieved two major milestones, with the first novel targets added to AstraZeneca’s portfolio for both CKD and IPF. 

The Benevolent Platform is disease agnostic, meaning it can be applied to any disease and is capable of generating novel targets at scale. Scientists and technologists from both companies will use the Benevolent Platform™ and biomedical Knowledge Graph — which uniquely includes AstraZeneca proprietary data with public and licensed data from scientific literature, patents, genetics, chemistry, clinical trials and more — to better understand underlying disease mechanisms and identify novel targets.