Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis is teaming with Microsoft on a medical AI effort aimed at developing new data-driven techniques for drug discovery and development of specific therapies. The multi-year alliance announced this week would establish an AI innovation lab the drug maker would use to uncover new drug designs, cell and gene therapies as well as "personalized" therapies for macular degeneration. The partners said their collaboration would seek to connect the drug maker's broad data sets with Microsoft's AI technologies with the goal of creating new AI models and drug and therapy applications. Among the areas to be explored are computational-intensive life sciences projects ranging from generative chemistry to scaling cell and gene therapies, the partners said Tuesday (Oct. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Novartis (NYSE: NVS) also said they would collaborate on development next-generation AI platforms to support broader utilization of the technology across the drug maker's operations.