Merck announced a research collaboration with the Mayo Clinic to integrate Mayo Clinic Platform clinical and genomic datasets with Merck’s AI-enabled virtual cell technologies. The initial focus areas are inflammatory bowel disease, atopic dermatitis and multiple sclerosis, with the aim of improving target identification and accelerating translation into drug discovery programs. Under the agreement Merck will access Mayo Clinic registries, biorepositories and computational tools to validate AI models and prioritize targets. The deal reflects large pharmas’ growing strategy to combine real‑world clinical datasets with proprietary computational platforms to de‑risk early discovery and increase the probability of clinical success.