MSD expands AI push with Google Cloud deal and Mayo Clinic collaboration
MSD signed a Google Cloud agreement worth up to $1 billion and entered an AI-focused R&D collaboration with Mayo Clinic. The deals expand AI use in drug discovery, development and broader operations.
MSD has agreed a deal with Google Cloud that will put the tech giant's AI tools in the hands of its 75,000 employees worldwide, and has entered a research and development collaboration with Mayo Clinic to utilise AI, advanced analytics, and multimodal clinical data in support of drug discovery and precision medicine. The strategic-level agreement with Google Cloud spans several years and has a value of up to $1 billion, while the Mayo Clinic collaboration will combine Platform architecture and clinical-genomic datasets with MSD’s virtual cell technologies to improve target identification, drive early development decisions, and enhance disease understanding.
The Google Cloud agreement will see Google Cloud's agentic AI platform integrated across the board at the pharma group, including R&D, manufacturing, commercial, and corporate functions. MSD will house Google Cloud workers alongside its own teams as the alliance plays out. The tools at the drugmaker's disposal will include the recently launched Gemini Enterprise, the central AI engine for deploying and managing the entire agent ecosystem.
The platform includes a portfolio of specialised, pre-built agents, including Deep Research, which autonomously plans and executes multi-step R&D tasks and allows scientists to bring together open-source web data and proprietary, in-house information in a single application. Deep Research comes in two flavours, a regular version for speed and efficiency, and a Max version for the highest quality context gathering and synthesis.
Under the Mayo Clinic collaboration, MSD gets direct access to de-identified clinical and multimodal datasets, registries, biorepositories, advanced AI tools, analytics, and the ability to scale solutions through the new Mayo Clinic Platform_Orchestrate programme. MSD will use Mayo Clinic’s diverse multimodal data, including medical imaging, laboratory results, molecular data, and clinical notes, to validate AI models and inform research insights for discovery and development strategies.
The partnership’s initial focus will be on therapies in dermatology, including atopic dermatitis, neurology, including multiple sclerosis, and gastroenterology, including inflammatory bowel disease. MSD's chairman and CEO said the company aims to integrate high-quality clinical data and AI-enabled insights into discovery research to improve target identification and, ultimately, the probability of success for its programmes.
MSD's chief information and digital officer said the Google Cloud collaboration represents the next phase of the company's AI journey, extending its longstanding use of advanced technologies into an intelligent agentic ecosystem that will work alongside its teams. Google Cloud's chief executive said the partnership represents a fundamental shift in how technology supports the entire pharma value chain.