Merck expands AI push with Google Cloud and Mayo Clinic partnerships
Merck is expanding its AI efforts through partnerships with Google Cloud and Mayo Clinic. The company said it will deploy AI across R&D and use multimodal clinical datasets to support drug discovery and precision medicine.
Merck & Co. is joining forces with Google Cloud and has entered into a strategic research and development collaboration with Mayo Clinic aimed at accelerating artificial intelligence-enabled drug discovery and precision medicine initiatives. The companies said the Google Cloud partnership will work to deploy AI across Merck's drug research, regulatory work, manufacturing and commercial operations, while the Mayo Clinic agreement will use multimodal clinical datasets to enhance disease understanding, improve biological target identification and support early-stage development decisions.
Merck will invest up to one billion dollars over several years in the Google Cloud collaboration. The chief information and digital officer said the companies haven't defined a specific time frame for the collaboration, but he expects it to be at least a decade-long partnership.
Merck plans to use AI across the drug development process, including running computerized simulations of laboratory experiments and speeding the regulatory process. The chief information and digital officer said Merck has used AI to help prepare sections of clinical study reports for roughly two years and already has used Google's technology to cut down by half the time and cost of compiling dossiers required in many countries to secure reimbursement for new medicines.
The Mayo Clinic agreement brings together Merck's artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities with Mayo Clinic's clinical expertise, genomic datasets and digital platform infrastructure. The collaboration will integrate Merck's AI-driven virtual cell technologies with the Mayo Clinic Platform, a secure data environment that aggregates de-identified clinical data from Mayo Clinic's U.S. operations and its international partner network.
Through this integration, Merck will gain access to multimodal clinical datasets, including laboratory results, medical imaging, clinical notes, molecular data, registries and biorepositories, to validate AI models and translate research insights into actionable drug discovery and development strategies. A central component of the partnership is Mayo Clinic Platform_Orchestrate, which provides direct access to clinical and scientific expertise, advanced analytics tools and AI-enabled discovery capabilities spanning computational and spatial biology.
The initial phase of the collaboration will focus on high-need therapeutic areas across three specialties: gastroenterology, specifically inflammatory bowel disease; dermatology, particularly atopic dermatitis; and neurology, with an emphasis on multiple sclerosis. Mayo Clinic said the collaboration marks its first strategic partnership of this scale with a global biopharmaceutical company.