BenevolentAI, a UK company using artificial intelligence for drug development, has raised $115 million in new funding, mostly from undisclosed investors in the United States. Existing backer Woodford Investment Management also participated in the round, which brings the company's total funds raised to over $200 million. "We are very pleased with the response to the fundraising," Ken Mulvany, founder and chairman of BenevolentAI, said in a statement. "It reflects the rapidly growing global interest in the AI pharmaceutical sector and the recognition of our place as the dominant player within it. We have come a very long way since we founded the business in 2013. The capabilities of our technology didn't exist six years ago. We are the pioneers in this sector and have evolved into a fully integrated, AI-enabled drug development company with the ability to deliver better medicines at previously unimaginable speeds -- this ultimately means patients will receive the right medicines, at a lower cost, in less time."

The next blockbuster drug could be developed with help from machine-learning techniques that are rapidly spreading from AI research to pharmacology labs. Deep Genomics, a Canadian company that uses machine learning to trace potential genetic causes for disease, announced Tuesday that it's getting into drug development. It joins a growing list of AI companies betting that their techniques can help produce powerful new drugs by finding subtle signals in huge quantities of genomic data. Deep Genomics was founded by Brendan Frey, a professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in both machine learning and genomic medicine. His company uses deep learning, or very large neural networks, to analyze genomic data.

The Ice Bucket Challenge raised awareness of the disease ALS in 2014. There is no cure for Alzheimer's, even though it's one of the most common diseases in older people. It takes a lot of time and money to produce even the most everyday medicines, let alone a cure for something like Alzheimer's. According to the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, it costs £1.12 billion and up to 12 years to develop a single drug. Imagine if artificial intelligence could speed that process up.

Last month both the UK and US governments published reports on how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will impact society in the coming years. It was landmark moment, thrusting AI into national and political conversations. At the same time Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist, called AI the greatest threat in human history. While the government reports acknowledge a danger – mainly surrounding job loss and ethical issues – it is not the Skynet scenario Hawking implied with his speech. However, both he and the government reports believe AI and automation, if monitored closely, will transform not only business operations but the world as we know it.

Benevolent.ai, a British artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare company, has hired IBM's AI expert Jérôme Pesenti, ex-VP of Watson Core Technology, to head up its technology division. Founded in 2013, benevolent.ai was spun out of the management team working at Proximagen, a pharmaceutical company, who were frustrated with the slow pace of drug discovery. Data from patient databases and scientific papers is constantly expanding, said Ken Mulvany, chairman of benevolent.ai. Some of the information might be true, some of it will be speculative, and some of it will be false. The human brain just doesn't have the capacity to keep up," Mulvany told The Register. Benevolent.ai aims to analyse data and form connections through a knowledge graph, allowing researchers to observe patterns they might have missed. "The data might show that a protein upregulates a particular gene.