Merck and the Mayo Clinic announced a research and development collaboration to integrate Mayo Clinic Platform clinical and genomic datasets with Merck’s AI‑enabled virtual cell technologies. The multi‑disease partnership will initially focus on inflammatory bowel disease, atopic dermatitis and multiple sclerosis to accelerate target identification and validation. Under the agreement Merck gains access to Mayo’s registries, biorepositories and computational tools to validate AI models and bridge translational gaps. Both institutions emphasized combining high‑quality, longitudinal clinical data with proprietary computational pipelines to improve probability of success in early discovery. Financial terms were not disclosed.