Toronto, CANADA, September 9, 2024—BenchSci, a world leader in AI solutions for preclinical research and drug discovery, today announced a new partnership with The Company of Biologists.
This agreement expands BenchSci’s platform, ASCEND, by integrating access to a large library of high-quality scientific publications, including their five specialist peer-reviewed journals: Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, Disease Models & Mechanisms, and Biology Open.
BenchSci’s ASCEND platform is designed by scientists for scientists. As an AI Assistant, the platform mimics how scientists understand and extract biomedical data. It analyzes scientific publications, extracting valuable insights from both text and images to build a comprehensive, structured knowledge base. This enables scientists to efficiently uncover hidden biological connections, surface contextual evidence, and identify potential risks early. By streamlining preclinical research and prioritizing the most promising experiments, ASCEND accelerates the path to life-saving treatments.
With over 1.5 million new scientific articles on biomedicine and life sciences published annually, the rapidly growing body of scientific literature presents a significant challenge for drug discovery researchers (González-Márquez et al., 2024). Access to crucial research often remains restricted due to paywalls, hindering scientific progress and innovation. BenchSci’s platform tackles this challenge by partnering with publishers to bring together the world’s growing biomedical data, including open and closed-access publications, patents, preprints, and third-party data.
“Researchers rely on documented experiments and findings from research publications to push the boundaries of discovery. However, due to the volume of research, extracting up-to-date and reliable information poses a significant challenge that often leads to unnecessary experimental error and missed research opportunities,” said CEO and Co-Founder of BenchSci, Liran Belenzon. “Through this partnership, we're empowering scientists with greater access to the world's scientific findings, accelerating drug discovery.”
By integrating The Company of Biologists' portfolio of publications, BenchSci expands its platform's reach and capabilities in areas such as target identification and validation, assay optimization, and lead compound discovery.
"We are pleased to be entering a new partnership with BenchSci as we feel that the services they offer align closely with our mission of supporting and inspiring the biological community. This new collaboration will offer researchers many benefits, including accelerating discovery of our biological content through wider international dissemination via the ASCEND platform, which we hope will help to stimulate new thinking and insights", said Shelly Turner, Head of Sales and Business Development at The Company of Biologists.
Access to data from The Company of Biologists will be available on BenchSci’s platform in early 2025.
About BenchSci
BenchSci is a world leader in AI solutions for drug discovery on a mission to exponentially increase the speed and quality of life-saving R&D to help bring new medicines to patients faster. We apply AI to understand how disease biology works throughout the drug discovery pipeline to solve the number one reason drug discovery projects fail—getting the biology wrong. Our platform, ASCEND, acts as a scalable AI assistant for preclinical organizations, increasing the productivity of the preclinical R&D pipeline across therapeutic areas. Backed by top-tier investors, including Generation Investment Management, iNovia Capital, TCV, F-Prime, Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), and Golden Ventures, BenchSci has raised over $200 million. Our platform accelerates science at 16 top-20 pharmaceutical companies and over 4,500 leading research centers worldwide. We’re a Deloitte Technology Fast 50™ and Fast 500™ winner and a certified Great Place to Work®. For more information about BenchSci, visit www.benchsci.com.
About The Company of Biologists
The Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publishing organisation dedicated to supporting and inspiring the biological community. We partner with libraries and library consortia to enable biologists worldwide to access our leading peer-reviewed hybrid journals — Development, Journal of Cell Science, and Journal of Experimental Biology — and our fully OA journals — Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open.
We also have a long-standing and ongoing commitment to Open Access. Our cost-neutral Read & Publish initiative enables corresponding authors at participating institutions to publish an uncapped number of OA research articles in our hybrid journals and our two fully OA journals — without paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). We were the first not-for-profit publisher to commit to the Transformative Journal approach and our journals were the first to be awarded Transformative Journal status by Plan S. Over 850 institutions in 51 countries are now participating in our cost-neutral Read & Publish OA initiative. We also have Read & Publish agreements with many library consortia.
A tree is planted in a UK forest every time a researcher publishes a research or review article with The Company of Biologists. Learn more about our new bio-positive publishing initiative, The Forest of Biologists
For more information, please contact Christina Peck at cpeck@benchsci.com.
