By Jackie Hunter, CEO, BenevolentBio

Published: 16 March 2018

Jackie Hunter, CEO of Benevolent Bio, reflects on her experience judging the inaugural BenevolentAI Award.

There is less than a week to go until we announce the winner of the first BenevolentAI award. Since applications closed in late January, the process has been one my fellow judge, Aisling Burnand, CEO of Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC), and I have found enjoyable, insightful and richly rewarding.

Without giving too much away, the applications we’ve received have reconfirmed the ambition and vision of medical research charities, both big and small, to lead the charge against many well known, but also many greatly under-represented conditions.

From our side, in terms of what we hope to offer to the winner, the potential impact I can see us having to help advance the applicants scientific research is tremendously exciting. The award will provide access to our AI-driven hypothesis engine, allowing the winning charity to interrogate data and generate new answers quickly and efficiently. This will allow the organisation to better understand their disease area in a way that was previously impossible and provide the winning candidate with opportunities to:

• Identify new potential disease targets and treatment opportunities
• Shape an organisation’s research strategy so that it focuses on highly specific areas of interest that have the best chance of leading to an impact
• Examine a charity’s current research portfolio for untapped potential, identifying projects that might have particular intellectual property interest
• Analyse grant applications for their technological potential to lead to new developments, thereby informing an organisation’s decision-making activity.

Whoever emerges as the overall winner, I would like to thank everyone who has entered the process.

I’m very much looking forward to working closely with the winner in our year-long partnership.

On 28 March, in partnership with BenevolentBio, we will announce the winning charity, which will benefit from the BenevlolentBio’s unique medical artificial intelligence technology platform for the rest of 2018.

Further details are available here.