Merck & Mayo Clinic Unite to Transform Drug Development

Merck and Mayo Clinic announced a major research and development agreement focused on advancing AI drug discovery.

The collaboration brings together Merck’s growing investment in AI-enabled virtual cell technologies with Mayo Clinic’s powerful data platform and clinical expertise to speed up drug development and improve success rates.

Through the Mayo Clinic Platform and its new Platform_Orchestrate program, Merck will gain secure access to de-identified clinical and multimodal datasets. These include laboratory results, medical imaging, clinical notes, molecular data, registries, and biorepositories.

Also Read: How a Culture of Thanks Fuels Retention in Hospitals

The goal is to combine real-world clinical insights and genomic data with advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools to sharpen disease understanding and improve target identification. The companies expect this AI drug discovery effort to strengthen early development decisions and translate research findings into real therapies.

Under the agreement—the first strategic collaboration of this scale for Mayo Clinic with a global biopharmaceutical company—Merck will validate AI models using Mayo’s extensive data resources.

"New cutting-edge technologies are enhancing our ability to innovate with the potential to bring important new therapies to patients faster. By working with Mayo Clinic, we aim to integrate high-quality clinical data and AI-enabled insights into discovery research to improve target identification and, ultimately, the probability of success for our programs," said Robert M. Davis, chairman and CEO, Merck.

“By combining Mayo Clinic Platform's de-identified data, clinical expertise and Platform technology with Merck's world-class research and development capabilities, we are poised to speed innovative breakthroughs to patients and redefine drug development," said Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., president and CEO, Mayo Clinic. "This collaboration represents a new present and future for healthcare—one where platform-based collaboration leads to more answers, more cures and better outcomes for patients worldwide."