The collaboration will convene AMR leaders to define and prioritize AI-ready datasets and evaluations to advance AMR research through an open call for proposals and community workshops in North America and APAC

The Align Foundation, a nonprofit accelerating predictive biology by convening the world's leading minds to generate and optimize the data that powers AI breakthroughs, today announced a partnership with Google DeepMind, the world’s leading AI lab, to work with the global community to chart a new roadmap for data and evaluations that can help drive AI for AMR research. Building on the calls to action within the AI for AMR report released by Google DeepMind and the Fleming Initiative, the organizations will convene global experts in microbiology, medicine, and AI to define and prioritize data generation. Resulting datasets will enable the development of “dream models”–predictive systems capable of catalyzing field-wide changes in how the world understands, predicts, and ultimately addresses AMR.

“Our vision at Align is to build the research infrastructure needed to make biological data collection and model development frictionless, scalable, and shareable,” said Peter Kelly, Co-founder and Head of Science at The Align Foundation. “We’re excited to collaborate with Google DeepMind on AMR to create a space where researchers can jointly define the data needed and subsequent models that would truly move the needle for drug resistance. This partnership is about centering the community’s most pressing questions and then developing the shared understanding of data, methods, and benchmarks required to answer them.”

As part of the roadmapping effort, Align and Google DeepMind will host two AMR Community Workshops, one in North America and another in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in spring 2026. The invite-only ideation workshops will surface leading regional perspectives from across disciplines to build prioritized, technically defined dataset proposals with concrete use cases, data standards, and evaluation frameworks required to enable predictive modeling of AMR. The workshops are designed to generate funding‑ready project plans for implementable dataset blueprints that can serve as launchpads for multi-year, multi-stakeholder data generation initiatives.

During the open submission window, the partners will solicit diverse input addressing priority datasets for novel research questions that could accelerate the development of robust, clinically relevant AMR models that can positively impact health outcomes. Interested applicants can learn more and submit concepts by visiting the submission portal through March 31, 2026.

“Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most urgent challenges in global health, and we believe AI can help researchers understand and address it in new and highly impactful ways,” said Agata Laydon, Science Lead in the Google DeepMind Impact Accelerator. “Working with The Align Foundation, we’re excited to support a global community of experts in shaping foundational AI for AMR capabilities that are grounded in real‑world needs and can be developed and evaluated in a safe, responsible way.”

AMR is one of the most significant global health threats we face today. AI technologies have the potential to help address many of the open questions and challenges and to accelerate research in AMR. AI models such as AlphaFold–which has already been cited in over 2,500 papers relevant to AMR–are already helping researchers answer important and long-standing questions, while the potential of others, such as Google’s AI co-scientist, is beginning to be demonstrated. However, for the most part, the broad potential of AI remains untapped because the necessary foundations, including AI-ready data and evaluations, are not yet available.

This partnership builds on Align’s work to create open, standardized biological datasets and benchmarks, including its efforts to generate large‑scale microbial phenotyping resources for the global AI research community. Align's community-driven processes have surfaced high-impact “dream datasets” that evolved into platform designs, technical reports, and collaborative project proposals. In its flagship GROQ‑Seq initiative to measure protein function at scale, Align’s roadmap has already advanced through methods development into active data generation across seven projects, including partnerships with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boston University’s DAMP Lab, Battelle, Profluent, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), and a global network of academic collaborators.

The AMR ideation sessions follow a similar arc, from shared vision to funded, multi-year data generation efforts fueling “dream model” development. These living datasets and data generation platforms will provide a durable foundation for future AI advances in AMR. Together with Google DeepMind, Align aims to ensure that future AMR dataset and evaluation investments accelerate meaningful downstream impact by the end of 2028.

Follow The Align Foundation on LinkedIn and X for the latest information and updates.

About The Align Foundation

The Align Foundation is a nonprofit research organization accelerating the future of life sciences by building large, open biological datasets to power predictive breakthroughs. Founded in 2021, Align enables dataset creation through high-throughput experimentation, automation partnerships, and global scientific collaboration. Align also hosts competitions to transparently benchmark scientific progress and measure the impact of open data. With support from philanthropic and research funders, Align is creating the reproducible, scalable, and shareable infrastructure needed to unlock the next generation of data‑powered breakthroughs in biology. Learn more at alignbio.org.

About Google DeepMind

Google DeepMind is a leading AI research organization working to build safe and responsible AI systems that can help solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Combining cutting‑edge research with large‑scale engineering, Google DeepMind develops advanced AI models and technologies that power products across Google and support breakthroughs in fields such as science, health, and robotics.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260224092382/en/

“We’re excited to collaborate with Google DeepMind on AMR to create a space where researchers can jointly define the data needed and subsequent models that would truly move the needle for drug resistance." — Peter Kelly, co-founder of The Align Foundation