Bringing new medicines and hope to patients faster all starts with preclinical research. But on average, a staggering 98 percent of all pharmaceutical research investment fails to reach patients. There’s a reason for this: biology is incredibly complex. Choosing the right targets, designing successful experiments, and identifying safety and efficacy risks, as just a few examples, involve hundreds or even thousands of trial-error processes and require scientists to work with a seemingly endless number of publications and databases. This costs the industry billions in R&D investment annually and delays new medicines for patients in need.

BenchSci is excited to announce the launch of our latest technology that aims to transform and improve outcomes and timelines for this crucial stage of drug discovery. ASCEND™ by BenchSci, our revolutionary new AI software platform has the potential to fundamentally change preclinical research. Building on the success of our AI-Assisted Reagent Selection application, we’ve developed new applications to empower scientists to discover biological connections, dramatically reduce trial-and-error experimentation and uncover risks early to move the most promising projects forward faster. 

ASCEND harnesses our experimental evidence engine powered by proprietary machine learning (ML) technology that is trained by Ph.D. scientists to extract experiment evidence from internal and external data sources. By applying our breakthrough vision ML technology to read and scan figures, charts, and graphs, scientists can uncover data and evidence never before correlated or discovered. Using curated ontology datasets, ASCEND makes connections across experiment outcomes to create the first commercially available, unbiased, and evidenced-based map of the underlying biology of disease. 

We’re thankful to our team, our trusted industry partners, and our scientific advisory board who have worked tirelessly with us over the past two years, under the code name Project Butterfly, to help BenchSci launch this platform. We’re also grateful to many of our customers, such as Amgen, who were early adopters of the technology, and who have already experienced significant improvements to their portfolio performance. 

In addition to the data and evidence from over 15 million publications, and counting, ASCEND also securely incorporates our customers’ internal experiment data. As a result, a powerful and proprietary view of an organization's unique biological insights, from across its research history, is instantly at its scientists’ fingertips. This approach not only helps scientists understand the feasibility of new or existing pursuits but also how to most effectively test them. 

The increasing complexity of disease biology makes new discoveries challenging. Scientists have been underserved for decades, without major advancements in tools and technology to help them efficiently navigate the magnitude of scientific data and evidence. ASCEND will help them make great leaps in productivity, taking their work and the industry forward. And we’re grateful that we can play a part in that journey. 

If you’re interested in learning more please visit the Knowledge Center or contact your account team. Visit benchsci.com to request a demo of ASCEND.

We’d love to hear how you would use this groundbreaking new platform to increase the speed and efficacy of your research! Let us know in the comments below.  Subscribe to our blog for all the latest BenchSci news and updates.