Mila announces collaboration with AstraZeneca to maximize the potential of AI for drug discovery and development

MONTRÉAL, QC, Feb. 16, 2021 – Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute – today announced a collaboration with AstraZeneca, a global leader in biopharmaceuticals, to drive forward AI innovation in healthcare for drug discovery and development. Mila’s renowned expertise in machine learning, combined with AstraZeneca’s deep R&D knowledge and data science and AI teams, aim to help accelerate AstraZeneca’s research and development activities.

This newly established collaboration will bring together and empower some of the leading experts in AI to scale up ideas and push the boundaries of traditional drug discovery and development with advanced computational methods. Recognizing the prevailing momentum for transformative solutions in healthcare, Mila and AstraZeneca seek to leverage collaboration and expert knowledge to work toward outcomes such as using AI to better understand disease, augment drug design and streamline big data analytics for image analysis, clinical trials and precision medicine.

“With the combined strengths of pharmaceutical and digital intelligence communities, AI has the potential to bring forward transformative solutions that will have a meaningful and sustainable impact, while delivering significant value to healthcare. We are globally facing unprecedented challenges in the pandemic’s wake, making cross-sector collaborations like the one between Mila and AstraZeneca more essential than ever.” – Stéphane Létourneau, Executive Vice-President, Mila

“To address all the issues facing healthcare we need to work together, bringing the best talent to bear on the toughest problems. This collaboration with Mila has the potential to accelerate the application of AI to the discovery and development of new medicines to address unmet needs.” – Lindsay Edwards, Vice President and Head of AI Respiratory and Immunology, R&D, AstraZeneca

In the coming months, both parties will consolidate their efforts to identify and prioritize key projects with the aim of accelerating the development of healthcare technologies with tangible societal benefits.


Click here to watch the launch video.

For further information:

Mila:

Diep Truong

Media Relations

514-436-2121

diep@exergue.ca

Related Links:

https://www.astrazeneca.com/r-d/data-science-and-ai.html

https://mila.quebec/en/