Artificial intelligence company and four UK charities partner to find a cure for AMD

BenevolentAI and Action Against AMD, a group of UK sight loss charities, have today announced their partnership to use BenevolentAI’s technology to find treatments and a potential cure for the leading cause of blindness in the UK – age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

BenevolentAI is collaborating with a group of four charities partnering to find a cure for AMD. Blind Veterans UK, Fight for Sight, the Macular Society and Scottish War Blinded have formed Action Against AMD to increase the funding for research into the condition and specifically to help develop an intervention that stops people losing their sight from AMD. 

BenevolentAI will use its proprietary technology platform to comprehensively review and understand the millions of scientific papers, clinical trials information, images, formulas, patents and additional data sets relating to AMD.  The technology will then conduct complex reasoning to create a new understanding of the disease, learn, explore, create and translate what it has learnt from this vast volume of information to pin-point important research areas, possible ways of preventing AMD and potential treatments.

AMD is the main cause of sight loss in developed countries and the third biggest worldwide. In the UK more than 600,000 have late stage AMD and this is set to double by 2050 as people live longer. Many more older people have early AMD that does not yet affect their sight so finding ways to detect and treat the disease before it causes sight loss is vital.

Dr. Jackie Hunter, CEO BenevolentBio, the bioscience subsidiary of BenevolentAI that focuses on accelerating drug discovery and development, commented: “BenevolentAI’s deep learning linguistic models, knowledge graph and algorithms will be applied to create a better understanding of AMD, generate new insights and identify promising new research areas for treating this devastating condition.”

Action Against AMD Chair