Benev­o­len­tAI, Ex­sci­en­tia on the come­back trail af­ter se­cur­ing sep­a­rate AI drug dis­cov­ery deals with Mer­ck KGaA

Mer­ck KGaA has inked two sep­a­rate AI drug dis­cov­ery part­ner­ships with Benev­o­len­tAI and Ex­sci­en­tia that are fo­cused on three tar­gets in on­col­o­gy, neu­rol­o­gy and im­munol­o­gy, rep­re­sent­ing a promis­ing change in di­rec­tion for the UK-based AI com­pa­nies.

Ex­sci­en­tia will get $20 mil­lion up­front up­on start­ing each of the three projects un­der a deal worth $674 mil­lion across all mile­stones. Benev­o­len­tAI will re­ceive a low dou­ble-dig­it mil­lion dol­lar pay­ment up­front in a deal po­ten­tial­ly worth $594 mil­lion, and both com­pa­nies could get tiered roy­al­ties on fu­ture sales.

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