Merck and Mayo Clinic Announce New Research and Development Collaboration to Support AI-Enabled Drug Discovery and Precision Medicine
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Merck & Co., known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, has entered into a research and development agreement with Mayo Clinic to advance AI-enabled drug discovery and precision medicine.
The collaboration will apply artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and multimodal clinical data to strengthen drug discovery and development. It will combine the Mayo Clinic Platform architecture, along with its clinical and genomic datasets, with Merck’s efforts to use AI-enabled virtual cell technologies. The aim is to improve disease understanding, refine target identification and support early-stage development decisions.
Through the Mayo Clinic Platform, which brings together data from Mayo Clinic in the United States and its international partner network in a secure setting, Merck will access de-identified clinical and multimodal datasets. These include laboratory results, medical imaging, clinical notes, molecular data, registries and biorepositories. The collaboration also provides access to advanced AI and machine learning tools, as well as clinical and scientific expertise, to help validate AI models and translate research findings into development strategies.
This agreement marks Mayo Clinic’s first strategic collaboration of this scale with a global biopharmaceutical company. The partners aim to use high-quality clinical data and AI-driven insights to improve the probability of success in research programmes and accelerate the delivery of new therapies.
The initial focus will be on areas with significant unmet medical need across three specialties:
- Gastroenterology: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)
- Dermatology: Atopic dermatitis
- Neurology: Multiple sclerosis
The collaboration builds on Merck’s broader investment in AI and machine learning across computational and spatial biology, AI foundation models and real-world data. Both organisations intend to apply advanced technologies in a structured and evidence-based manner to improve drug development and patient outcomes.
Source: businesswire.com
