BenevolentAI announced that AstraZeneca has selected an additional novel target for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) for its drug development portfolio, resulting in a milestone payment to BenevolentAI. This is the third novel target from the collaboration that has been identified using the Benevolent Platform™ across two disease areas, IPF and chronic kidney disease, and subsequently validated and selected for portfolio entry by AstraZeneca. This builds upon the recent extension of the collaboration with AstraZeneca to include two new disease areas, systemic lupus erythematosus and heart failure, signed in January 2022.

The Benevolent Platform™ is a disease-agnostic AI-enabled drug discovery platform that is capable of generating novel targets at scale. As part of the collaboration, BenevolentAI integrated AstraZeneca's data into its biomedical Knowledge Graph, which includes proprietary, public and licensed data from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, scientific literature, patents, genetics, chemistry and clinical trials. BenevolentAI and AstraZeneca scientists work side-by-side, using the platform and Knowledge Graph to interrogate the underlying mechanisms of IPF, to frame and test hypotheses and rapidly identify novel targets.