Merck, Lilly and Pfizer are teaming with PureTech Ventures, a venture capital firm, to create a new entity that will focus on drug-discovery methods in hopes of reducing the failure rate of clinical trials, The Wall Street Journal reports. The new firm will be called Enlight Biosciences and has $39 million in backing.

Enlight is the only for-profit venture in which Merck or Lilly collaborates with its rivals, according to the paper. Barbara Dalton, Pfizer’s vp for venture capital at Pfizer, says she is was unaware of any other collaborations. The drugmakers maintain there are no competitive conflicts because they view the technologies Enlight seeks to develop, including advanced body-imaging methods, as “pre-competitive,” David Steinberg, Enlight’s ceo, tells the Journal.

“Today, drug discovery is tremendously tech-dependent, and many of the pharmaceutical companies are falling behind,” Enlight co-founder Raju Kucherlapati, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, tells the paper. “If you can find the winners earlier, and lose faster with the failures, you can really improve R&D productivity,” Steve Paul, Lilly’s executive vp for science and technology, adds.

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