Merck & Co., known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, 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 agreement brings together Merck’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities with Mayo Clinic’s extensive 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 enhance disease understanding, improve biological target identification and support early-stage development decisions.
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 collaboration marks Mayo Clinic’s first strategic partnership of this scale with a global biopharmaceutical company.
Under the agreement, Merck will use Mayo Clinic’s multimodal datasets to validate AI models and translate research insights into actionable drug discovery and development strategies. The initiative aligns with Merck’s broader investments in AI and machine learning across computational biology, foundation models and real-world data analytics to improve the probability of success in its research pipeline.
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. The partners aim to apply advanced analytics and multimodal approaches to enable the development of more effective and tailored therapies in these areas.
The alliance reflects a growing trend of platform-based collaboration between healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies, as the industry increasingly leverages large-scale clinical data and AI technologies to streamline discovery processes, enhance precision medicine strategies and potentially reduce development timelines.
