Synopsis
Drugmaker Merck & Co is joining forces with Google Cloud. They will invest up to one billion dollars over several years. This partnership aims to boost Merck's artificial intelligence capabilities. The collaboration will focus on AI infrastructure, engineers, and Google's Gemini Enterprise platform. This move is expected to accelerate drug research and development for Merck.Listen to this article in summarized format
The partnership, announced at Google's Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas, builds on work already underway between the companies and includes Google Cloud engineers working alongside Merck teams, executives from both companies said.
"I easily see us investing a billion over the next several years in this, in those capabilities," Dave Williams, Merck's chief information and digital officer, said in an interview. "We're not just buying tokens. It is really the tool set" Google Cloud offers, he said, including Gemini Enterprise and the company's engineers.
Williams said the companies haven't defined a specific time frame for the collaboration, but he expects it to be at least a decade-long partnership.
The companies said the partnership will work to deploy AI across Merck's drug research, regulatory work, manufacturing and commercial operations.
Both companies framed the collaboration as a way to accelerate drug development.
"We've always said we wanted AI to play a positive role in society. One of the ways is to help people find cures to illnesses," Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, said in the same interview. "They have the domain knowledge. We're bringing the AI tools and platform and cyber capability to help them build using these tools."
Merck plans to use AI across the drug development process, Williams said, including running computerized simulations of laboratory experiments and speeding the regulatory process. Merck has used AI to help prepare sections of clinical study reports for roughly two years with some success, he said, and now plans to expand that approach.
"We feel there's a tremendous opportunity there, and it's a huge information challenge," he said.
Williams added that Merck already has used Google's technology to cut down by half the time and cost of compiling dossiers required in many countries to secure reimbursement for new medicines.
"This isn't a pilot," Williams said. "We're submitting dossiers in markets using this new capability, and we're now scaling it globally."
Google Cloud is a unit of Alphabet Inc.
