Sanofi Licenses BenchSci’s Neurosymbolic AI for Global Preclinical R&D
Sanofi has signed a three-year license agreement with Toronto-based BenchSci to deploy the ASCEND platform across its global preclinical research teams. The partnership marks a move to embed neurosymbolic AI into core R&D operations, offering scientists and contractors at Sanofi access to ASCEND’s structured discovery environment.
ASCEND is designed as an AI co-pilot for disease biology, combining a biomedical knowledge graph with large language model capabilities. At its core is the Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph (BEKG), which encodes more than 400 million entities and one billion relationships, sourced from full-text articles, experimental figures, reagent metadata, and licensed closed-access journals. The system captures and links experimental context (such as assay types, tissue sources, interventions, and outcomes) to enable traceable, reproducible insights.
BenchSci's "scientist in the loop" framework
According to the release, Sanofi’s license reflects a broader strategy to integrate AI at scale in drug development. With ASCEND, teams will be able to query scientific literature and internal data through a unified reasoning framework, prioritize targets based on biological evidence, and generate structured reports with links to underlying data. According to BenchSci, ASCEND is used at 16 of the top-20 pharma companies and at more than 4,500 research centers worldwide
The platform supports a range of R&D workflows, including target triage, mechanism exploration, reagent selection, and hypothesis generation. Its AI layer incorporates human-in-the-loop review from a team of over 100 scientists, ensuring consistency and validation across outputs. By aligning data formats and resolving ambiguity, ASCEND aims to reduce duplicated effort and de-risk early-stage decisions.
BenchSci, founded in 2015, has raised over $200 million with backers including Generation Investment Management, iNovia Capital, TCV, F-Prime, Gradient Ventures (Google spin-out), and Golden Ventures. The Sanofi deal adds to its footprint among large pharma clients as it pushes for broader adoption of structured AI infrastructure in discovery R&D.
Just a week ago, BenchSci also announced a collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific to co-develop AI tools for preclinical and translational research, pairing ASCEND’s knowledge-graph/LLM stack with Thermo Fisher’s instruments, consumables, and services.
Topic: AI in Bio
