Montreal, November 28, 2023 – Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, is pleased to announce a strategic collaboration with Merck, a leading global pharmaceutical company. This collaboration marks a significant intersection between the pharmaceutical industry and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, aiming to improve patient care and treatment.
The collaboration leverages Merck's extensive experience in pharmaceuticals and healthcare with Mila's expertise in responsible AI applications. By pooling resources and expertise, they will deploy innovative AI research to develop better healthcare tools in Quebec, Canada, and abroad.
“We recognize AI’s transformative potential in healthcare, and this agreement with MILA is an important milestone in our journey to help shape the future of patient care, allowing us to leverage world-class knowledge and expertise to drive innovation. With our team’s proximity to MILA’s vibrant AI ecosystem, we anticipate fruitful collaborations between our organizations.” said Marwan Akar, Managing Director at Merck Canada.
"We are proud to collaborate with Merck and combine their industry knowledge with Mila’s AI expertise in order to advance fundamental knowledge and drive innovation for the benefit of patients across the globe," said Yoshua Bengio, Mila’s founder and scientific director.
The collaboration between Merck and Mila underscores the increasing importance of responsible,interdisciplinary collaborations to address complex challenges in the healthcare sector.
About Merck
At Merck, known as MSD outside of the United States and Canada, we are unified around our purpose: We use the power of leading-edge science to save and improve lives around the world. For more than 130 years, we have brought hope to humanity through the development of important medicines and vaccines. We aspire to be the premier research-intensive biopharmaceutical company in the world – and today, we are at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions that advance the prevention and treatment of diseases in people and animals. We foster a diverse and inclusive global workforce and operate responsibly every day to enable a safe, sustainable and healthy future for all people and communities.
In Canada, Merck markets a broad range of vaccines, pharmaceutical and animal health products and is one of the top R&D investors in Canada, with investments totaling more than $90 million in 2022 and more than $1.6 billion since 2000. Based in Kirkland, Québec, Merck employs approximately 635 people across the country. For more information about our operations in Canada, visit www.merck.ca
About Mila
Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Mila is a research institute in artificial intelligence that now brings together over 1,200 specialized researchers in machine learning. Based in Montreal, Mila's mission is to be a global center for scientific advancements that inspire innovation and the growth of AI for the benefit of all. Mila is a globally recognized non-profit organization for its significant contributions to deep learning, especially in the fields of language modeling, automatic translation, object recognition, and generative models. For more information, visit mila.quebec.
