Pharmaceutical giants Bristol Myers Squibb and Takeda announced on October 1, 2025, that they are joining the AI Structural Biology (AISB) consortium, which already includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson. The goal of the collaboration is to jointly train the AI model OpenFold3 on their proprietary data on protein-small molecule interactions. A key feature of the initiative is the use of federated learning technology provided by the company Apheris. This approach allows for the training of a shared, more powerful model, while each companys valuable and confidential data never leaves its own servers. Thus, competitors can safely share "knowledge" without revealing the underlying data. This pre-competitive cooperation is intended to significantly improve the accuracy of interaction predictions and accelerate the early stages of new drug development for the entire industry.
Bristol Myers and Takeda Pool Data for AI-Based Drug Discovery
