- BenevolentAI is a developer of artificial intelligence and computational medicine technologies.
- The company is headquartered in London with a research facility in Cambridge (UK) and a further office in New York.
- Ken Mulvany, Brent Gutekunst, Ivan Griffin and Michael Brennan founded BenevolentAI on November 13, 2013 in London, United Kingdom.
About BenevolentAI
BenevolentAI is at the forefront of a revolution in drug discovery and development. The company combines advanced AI with cutting edge science to decipher complex disease biology, generate novel insights and discover more effective medicines.
Benevolent’s fundamentally unique approach begins with the belief that all biomedical information is valuable, so it analyses all available data sets from multiple and diverse modalities. Its computational R&D platform spans from data through to discovery and clinical development, enabling scientists to better understand the complexities of human disease and increase the probability of discovering a successful drug.
BenevolentAI has a hybrid business model: it both develops its own in-house pipeline and collaborates with pharmaceutical companies, and it has welcomed extraordinary results. BenevolentAI’s growing pipeline of over 25 drug programmes spans various development stages across a range of therapeutic areas.
In February 2021, the first patient was dosed in the clinical trial of its novel multi-target drug, BEN-2293, for atopic dermatitis. BenevolentAI also discovered an AI-generated target with zero prior linkage to Ulcerative Colitis, which has progressed from target validation to candidate selection in 2 years.
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Benevolent, Baricitinib and AstraZeneca
Benevolent is the only AI-drug discovery company with a clinically validated approach, having discovered a leading repurposed drug candidate for COVID-19 in just 48 hours.
Using their advanced drug repurposing workflows, they discovered previously unknown anti-viral properties of baricitinib, a drug owned by Eli Lilly. Their novel hypothesis was validated in global clinical trials and baricitinib is now approved for emergency use in the US, Japan and India. Baricitinib was shown to reduce mortality of hospitalised patients by 38% – the largest reduction in mortality in the COVID-19 patient population reported to date.
Finally, BenevolentAI delivered the first novel AI-generated chronic kidney disease target to AstraZeneca’s portfolio in 2021. The collaboration combines their AI and machine learning with AstraZeneca’s rich datasets to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying CKD and identify novel, more efficacious drug targets. This is just the beginning of what their partnership aims to achieve; together they have their sights set on transforming the entire culture and process of target discovery.
