MIT Jameel Clinic and Sanofi join forces to advance research in artificial intelligence and health

• Collaboration will leverage deep learning and machine learning to make new discoveries across disease pathways

The Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (“Jameel Clinic”) at MIT, a Cambridge, Mass.-based scientific research institute that harnesses the power of new technologies to transform healthcare, today announced a historic milestone that marks the first step in a long-term strategic collaboration with Sanofi, a multinational diversified healthcare company. The Jameel Clinic and Sanofi pharmaceutical research teams will collaborate on the development and application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to revolutionize healthcare and advance impactful and effective drug discovery and development.

This new partnership is the stepping stone towards larger collaborations with the pharma giant, with the intention of expanding the scope to other teams within the corporation to achieve even greater results. The collaboration will provide Sanofi with access to more than 50 principal investigators and researchers across MIT, and will leverage the combined experience of both organizations to evolve innovation within healthcare, democratize access to state-of-the-art healthcare technologies around the globe, and advance closely aligned visions of a healthier world and shared commitment to impact.

“We are excited to have Sanofi come on board as our collaborator in using data and technology to advance healthcare and positively impact the lives of people around the world,” said Ignacio Fuentes, Managing Director at Jameel Clinic. “Our new collaboration with Sanofi, which builds on our existing collaborations with pharmaceutical sector leaders, is an important step in advancing our work to reimagine the intersection of technology and health using data, AI and machine learning. Industry collaborations are vital to our ability to make new discoveries in machine learning, biology, chemistry and clinical sciences that will shape the future of drug discovery and development.

“Because our goal at Sanofi is to bring practice-changing medicines and vaccines to patients, our ambitions are very much aligned with the vision of the MIT Jameel Clinic to revolutionize healthcare and drug development,” said John Reed, Executive Vice President, Global Head of Research & Development, Sanofi. “This unique access to the research that is already underway in the machine learning space will further our mission. We look forward to our Sanofi data scientists collaborating with experts at MIT, and leveraging innovative technology platforms that will help deliver new insights into disease pathways along with next-generation ML- and AI-enabled drug discovery and development capabilities.”

MIT Jameel Clinic and Sanofi will work on multiple projects focused on the development of machine learning models and algorithms across a range of research areas including biologics and small molecule drug design, precision medicine (immunology, inflammation), as well as oncology treatment.

Members of the MIT Jameel Clinic gain access to MIT’s research in deep learning and machine learning applied to detect breast cancer and ovarian cancer, sensitive biomarkers for stroke treatment, robotics; natural language processing; computer vision; big data; genomics, medicine, and healthcare.

This collaboration builds on a growing foundation of recent partnerships at MIT Jameel Clinic with other pharmaceutical companies and industry players, all working to advance collaboration between the life sciences and technology communities.

For more information on the work being carried out by Jameel Clinic and its partners, please visit https://www.jclinic.mit.edu/.