Merck, Mayo Clinic announce new R&D collaboration

Merck (MRK) and Mayo Clinic announced a research and development agreement to apply artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and multimodal clinical data to support drug discovery and development. The agreement integrates Mayo Clinic’s Platform architecture as well as clinical and genomic datasets with Merck’s ambition to harness AI-enabled virtual cell technologies to enhance disease understanding, improve target identification and drive early development decisions. Under the agreement, which marks Mayo Clinic’s first strategic collaboration of this scale with a global biopharmaceutical company, Merck will leverage Mayo Clinic’s extensive multimodal data-including laboratory results, medical imaging, clinical notes and molecular data-to support validation of AI models and help translate research insights into discovery and development strategies.