Merck and the Mayo Clinic agreed to a research collaboration to combine Mayo Clinic Platform clinical and genomic datasets with Merck’s AI‑enabled virtual cell technologies. The partnership will initially target inflammatory bowel disease, atopic dermatitis and multiple sclerosis to accelerate target identification and validation. Under the agreement Merck will access Mayo’s registries, biorepositories and computational tools to bolster AI model validation and translational research. Merck said the collaboration aims to improve target selection and raise the probability of clinical success. The pact illustrates a growing model: pharma pairing proprietary AI discovery engines with high‑quality clinical datasets from academic medical centers to shorten discovery timelines and better ground computational hypotheses in patient‑level data.