AstraZeneca is the latest Big Pharma company looking to tap into agentic artificial intelligence (AI), inking a three-year licensing deal with Owkin to leverage its autonomous “AI Scientist” platform.
The deal gives the drugmaker access to Owkin’s K Pro, an AI platform designed to help pharmaceutical teams analyze scientific, clinical and competitive data more quickly, according to a May 13 release.
As part of the deal, Owkin will build custom biopharma AI “agents” to help the drugmaker automate parts of the research and competitive intelligence process.
For example, Owkin’s competitive intelligence agent is designed to analyze clinical trial activity for specific targets or compounds, along with recruitment trends, potential outcomes and patent filings, the company told Fierce Medtech in a statement.
It can also be used to inform strategy and support clinical trial planning and internal decision-making, the company said. The platform taps into multimodal patient data sourced from more than 800 hospitals, according to the company.
“At Owkin, we believe the future of the pharmaceutical industry is agentic,” Owkin CEO and co-founder Thomas Clozel said in announcing the deal.
The tools will be integrated into AZ’s IT infrastructure and decision workflows. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The deal comes as drug companies increasingly turn to AI for everything from shortening drug development timelines to scouting potential acquisitions. AstraZeneca highlighted its AI ambitions during its latest earnings presentation, saying the technology would remain central to its push toward a goal of reaching $80 billion in revenue by 2030.
Other Big Pharma AI partnerships announced in recent months include Bristol Myers Squibb’s linkup with Faro to improve clinical trial protocols and Novo Nordisk’s and Merck’s enterprise-wide partnerships with OpenAI and Google, respectively. Earlier this year, Eli Lilly and tech giant Nvidia unveiled a new Nvidia supercomputer, named Lillypod.
AstraZeneca’s deal with Owkin builds on earlier work between the two companies to develop an AI-powered tool to pre-screen for inherited BRCA mutations for breast cancer, also known as germline BRCA or gBRCA.
