One such decisive action to boost its oncology research was made by pharmaceutical titan AstraZeneca, which has acquired AI start up Modella AI in Boston, a move that marked the first time that the company will have put more advanced artificial intelligence squarely into its drug discovery and development procedures. It is currently the first step toward a large pharmaceutical organization acquiring a fully dedicated artificial intelligence company instead of merely acquiring it as a contractor or supplier. The management of AstraZeneca has positioned the deal as a strategic investment to remain abreast with the growing complexity and intensity of data in the development of cancer drugs.

The following strategy is the inclusion of the Modella basis models and AI agents into the global oncology research and development of AstraZeneca. The aim of these AI tools is multimodal biomedical data, such as clinical, pathological, and molecular data, so that multimodal biomedical data can be interpreted more effectively and insights are generated more efficiently in the discovery and development phases. With these capabilities together with proprietary datasets and research capabilities of the company, AstraZeneca will aim to shorten the bottlenecks in trial design, biomarker identification, and clinical decision support.

One of the goals of the integration is to transform processes and activities like quantitative pathology and patient-selection of clinical trials to be more data-driven and predictive. Conventional oncology research processes may be time and resource-intensive with manual analysis of complicated data. Rapidly analyzed images of biopsies, correlations between protein expression and clinical outcomes, or identification of subtle trends in a wide range of altogether datasets through AI models suggest endlessly shortening timelines, increasing biomarker discovery, and eventually increasing the likelihood of clinical success of novel therapy.

Outside the direct benefits of the research, of higher interest is the tendency of the wider pharmaceutical industry to integrate AI as the foundation of innovations at AstraZeneca. Since drug discovery is growing more computational, industry players are competing over data, models and talent upon which next generation R&D infrastructure is based. Introducing the technology and expertise of Modella in-house, AstraZeneca is not only placing itself in the position to utilise AI as an instrument, but to influence the way artificial intelligence will be one of the principles of oncology research in the future.