The UK’s BenevolentAI has acquired a new drug discovery and development base in Cambridge, UK that it says makes it the first AI company able to cover the entire drug development process.

The firm says its new facility on the Babraham Research Campus will “radically reduce the time it takes for drug candidates to enter clinical testing”.

Ken Mulvany, founder and chairman of BenevolentAI, said: "We have built an artificial intelligence technology that can read and understand the world's biomedical information, then perform complex reasoning, to tell us things about disease never understood before. This enables us to discover new medicines like no other organisation and drive cures for diseases that were previously untreatable.

“The acquisition has expanded our scale and capability overnight and created something that previously did not exist - an AI company truly integrated across every stage of the drug development process."

The acquired drug discovery and development facility has a large scientific team with expertise in assay development and screening, medicinal and synthetic chemistry, drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, pharmacology and clinical development.

Those employees will be integrated with BenevolentAI's own drug discovery scientists and tasked with using AI to rapidly advance the right drugs to the right patients.

The company has previously generated novel drug candidates to treat a range of complex and previously untreatable diseases and within the last two year has built up a research pipeline that includes 19 programmes.

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