ASCEND

ASCEND by BenchSci is the world's first neuro-symbolic AI platform purpose-built to help biopharma organizations decode the complexity of disease biology. Designed for R&D scientists and drug discovery teams, ASCEND addresses one of the most critical bottlenecks in modern medicine: the fundamental lack of understanding of underlying disease mechanisms that causes over 90% of clinical trials to fail and stretches drug development timelines beyond a decade. By unifying diverse scientific data and applying advanced AI reasoning, ASCEND enables scientists to move from hypothesis to successful experiment in days rather than years.

At the heart of ASCEND is a rigorously vetted Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph (BEKG), curated by industry experts to ensure every piece of information is backed by traceable experimental evidence. The platform integrates scientific publications, multi-omics data, and clinical trial data into a single, unified view of disease biology. ASCEND also supports ingestion of a client's proprietary internal data — such as lab notebooks — to create a customized, secure map of disease biology tailored to each organization's needs.

Core Platform Capabilities

• Neuro-symbolic AI architecture combining a structured knowledge graph with advanced foundation models to deliver AI copilots and co-scientists that accelerate discovery.
• A Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph (BEKG) structuring over 400 million entities and one billion relationships, each linked directly to traceable experimental sources.
• Proprietary multimodal AI that extracts insights from scientific text, experimental figures, and supplementary files.
• Human-in-the-loop curation by a dedicated team of over one hundred scientists, ensuring scientific validity and consistency across the knowledge base.
• Natural language query support that translates researcher questions into complex, multi-hop scientific reasoning for deeper discovery.

What Differentiates ASCEND

• Unparalleled data access: Unlike platforms limited to public data, ASCEND integrates tens of millions of scientific publications — including closed-access journals through direct publisher agreements — alongside licensed, public, and client proprietary data, providing unmatched information breadth.
• Data quality and hallucination mitigation: The BEKG serves as an evidence backbone that grounds all AI outputs in experimentally verified sources, reducing the risk of AI-generated inaccuracies common in generic models.
• Deep biopharma workflow integration: ASCEND is not a standalone tool but an integrated solution designed to support and enhance how scientists already work, thinking like a scientist rather than a generic AI assistant.
• Augmentation over replacement: The platform is designed to empower researchers, overcoming industry caution by focusing on enhancing human scientific judgment rather than replacing it.

Deployment, Adoption, and Support

• Proven track record of deployment across leading pharmaceutical companies, with thousands of scientists actively using the platform.
• A dedicated account team is provided for each client, including PhD-level scientific liaisons who work directly with researchers to integrate the platform into existing workflows.
• Customized onboarding and change management support to ensure broad adoption and maximum impact across R&D teams.
• Ability to ingest and secure proprietary internal data, creating a tailored and confidential knowledge base for each organization.

ASCEND is guided by an advisory board comprising senior leaders from major pharmaceutical and technology organizations, including former Chief Scientific Officers from Pfizer and Takeda, global research heads from Sanofi, Amgen, Bayer, and Roche, and experts in machine learning from academia and industry. This depth of domain expertise informs the platform's continued development and its alignment with real-world biopharma R&D needs.