A New Symphony in Science: Agentic AI Takes Center Stage in Pharma Innovation
Every year, tens of billions of euros are poured into drug research and development worldwide — yet only a small number of new medicines ever reach the public. The process is long, complex, and often frustratingly slow.Now, a bold new rhythm is emerging in the pharmaceutical industry, conducted by IQVIA — the global maestro of clinical research and healthcare intelligence — and powered by the transformative force of agentic AI.
At NVIDIA GTC Paris at VivaTech, IQVIA unveiled its latest innovation: a suite of AI orchestrator agents developed in partnership with NVIDIA. These intelligent systems are poised to revolutionize pharmaceutical R&D by accelerating the intricate symphony of processes that bring new treatments to life.Imagine a conductor guiding an orchestra, each section playing its precise role. In this new paradigm, the AI orchestrator leads an ensemble of specialized sub-agents — each one an expert in a specific task, from transcribing speech to coding clinical data, extracting structured insights, and summarizing vast datasets. Every note is struck with precision, every section in harmony, all under the watchful eye of human experts.
With access to IQVIA’s immense troves of data — spanning many petabytes — and its unrivaled knowledge of life sciences, these agentic systems are meticulously trained and fine-tuned for peak performance. The result? A dramatic leap in productivity, efficiency, and the pace at which life-saving drugs can move from lab to life.
Agentic AI Strikes a Chord in Clinical Trials
IQVIA’s localized expertise on regulatory requirements in different countries, including those across Europe, puts the company center stage in the clinical space.Deployed in its healthcare-grade AI platform, IQVIA’s AI orchestrator agents are designed to accelerate every step of the pharmaceutical lifecycle, including clinical trials.Clinical trials represent a major accomplishment in the research and development process for pharmaceutical companies, but planning and executing a trial typically takes years. The start-up process, alone, often takes about 200 days and is manually intensive.
IQVIA’s clinical trial start-up AI orchestrator agent addresses the growing need for acceleration in clinical trial timelines.One component now accelerated by IQVIA’s AI orchestrator agents is target identification. This agent builds a knowledge base from research articles and biomedical databases, using customized AI models to identify key relationships among the data and extract insights.This knowledge then enables IQVIA’s pharmaceutical customers to identify emerging scientific areas for indication prioritization — like which indications they will pursue and in what order for a particular asset — and to discover new opportunities for drug repurposing, unlocking new uses that were previously unavailable..
Another agent, the clinical data review agent, uses a set of automated checks and specialized agents to catch data issues early, reducing the data review process from seven weeks to as little as two weeks.From molecule to market, AI promises to be transformative for life sciences and healthcare,” said Avinob Roy, vice president and general manager of product offerings for commercial analytics solutions at IQVIA.IQVIA’s agents use NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, to streamline clinical site start-up. The agent directs its sub-agents to analyze clinical trial protocols and extract critical participant inclusion and exclusion criteria, using reasoning to solve these problems in phased steps.
By deploying the orchestrator agent, which works autonomously, research teams can focus on decision-making instead of time-consuming administrative tasks.