BenevolentAI announced that AstraZeneca has selected a novel chronic kidney disease (CKD) target to advance to its drug development portfolio, making it the first AI-generated target from the collaboration to enter the Company's portfolio. The Benevolent Platform® predicted this novel target, which was subsequently biologically validated through AstraZeneca's rigorous experimental testing. In 2019, BenevolentAI and AstraZeneca entered a strategic collaboration aiming to discover new drugs for CKD and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).

The partnership combines AstraZeneca's scientific expertise and rich datasets with BenevolentAI's target identification platform and biomedical knowledge graph to understand these two complex diseases' underlying mechanisms and identify new and more efficacious drug targets. CKD is a complex, and debilitating disease which affects around 10% of the world's population. With the prevalence increasing, limited treatment options and patients progressively losing kidney function, there is a critical unmet need for new drugs that specifically target the cause of CKD.