Astellas Pharma and AstraZeneca are joining Bristol Myers Squibb by deploying Evinova’s AI-native platform in an effort to speed up clinical development.
BMS and Evinova first announced their agreement to leverage Evinova’s tech across the Big Pharma’s global portfolio earlier this month. The agreement said BMS would deploy Switzerland-based Evinova’s “cost optimizer” to make trial design and execution more efficient.
The new collaborations are a homecoming for Evinova, which was launched by AstraZeneca in 2023 to advance digital health solutions. In addition to BMS, AstraZeneca and Astellas have agreed to share their operational data with Evinova with a desire to accelerate clinical trials.
Evinova’s platform aims to optimize clinical development and make recommendations for improvement along the way. In a Feb. 23 release, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said he believes the partnership will lead to faster trials and better patient experience, while Astellas Chief Research & Development Officer Tadaaki Taniguchi, M.D., Ph.D., namechecked Evinova’s study designer platform as a way for the company’s teams to “be able to design smarter, more patient centered studies, eliminate avoidable rework and move with greater speed and precision.”
Evinova President Cristina Duran sees her company’s role in the biotech ecosystem as speeding up manual, fragmented processes and delivering benefits at scale. Evinova says its platform has achieved 5% to 7% savings per study, equating to hundreds of millions of dollars for its pharma partners.
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With a patent cliff expected to take a significant portion of biopharma profits in the next five to ten years, drug developers are leaning into AI to improve their drug development capabilities. AstraZeneca recently reupped its AI deal with Immunai to improve inflammatory bowel disease therapy and signed a $555 million AI immunotherapy partnership with Algen Biotechnologies—among others last year.
AI drug development and clinical trial deals are nearly ubiquitous in the space, but it’s not the only way to grow the pipeline. Astellas today announced a $1.7 billion global collaboration with Vir Biotechnology focused on a prostate cancer treatment, while AstraZeneca announced plans to invest $15 billion in the next four years to grow its cell therapy and radioconjugate capabilities.
