Pharmaceutical Companies Embed AI Into Clinical Trials and Drug Development Operations

Drug development has grown too expensive and too slow to rely on manual workflows, as the cost of bringing a single therapy to market climbs into the billions and approval timelines stretch across a decade or more. In response, pharmaceutical companies are reshaping their operating models around artificial intelligence. By embedding machine learning into trial execution and compliance infrastructure, drugmakers are targeting the most costly and failure-prone bottlenecks in how therapies are tested, reviewed and ultimately brought to market.

Large pharmaceutical companies are deploying AI tools to speed clinical trials and regulatory submissions by identifying eligible patients from fragmented health records, optimizing trial site selection, predicting dropout risks and even generating first drafts of regulatory filings for agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. With drug development costs regularly exceeding $2 billion to $3 billion per therapy and timelines stretching more than a decade, inefficiencies in trials and regulatory workflows represent both financial and human-health risks.

Clinical trials remain one of the costliest and slowest phases of drug development. AI is being applied to long-standing pain points such as patient recruitment, retention and safety monitoring. Regulatory authorities increasingly receive structured and unstructured health data—such as electronic health records and imaging—that traditional methods struggle to harmonize. AI models can ingest these disparate data types to create more accurate eligibility profiles and predict dropout risk, addressing two of the strongest predictors of trial failure.

Machine learning algorithms can analyze imaging data and real-world evidence to surface safety signals earlier than conventional methods, enabling proactive risk mitigation strategies. These predictive insights can inform both execution and regulatory strategy. Companies are exploring generative AI to draft clinical study reports and portions of regulatory submissions, a task that historically involved thousands of hours of manual compilation and editing. The aim is not to replace human experts, but to reduce repetitive labor and accelerate submission timelines without sacrificing rigor.

Thermo Fisher Scientific's PPD clinical research business has partnered with Datavant on a project to enhance the connection between real-world data and clinical research. The initiative focuses on secure data linkage – with an emphasis on preserving patient privacy – and ensuring it is interoperable, as well as enhancing analytics to support more efficient study design and faster evidence generation across the research lifecycle. The alliance will combine PPD's clinical trials and patient registry platforms with Datavant's tokenisation technology, which de-identifies patient data and allows electronic health record information to be incorporated securely.

AI's application in drug development didn't start with trials; it began in discovery. Computational chemistry tools that once assisted chemists in modeling and simulation are increasingly autonomous. AI is now taking over every step of drug discovery, from target selection to optimization, using pattern recognition to propose viable candidates far faster than traditional lab-based methods.

Big Tech and hardware players are entering these workflows, blurring the lines between IT and life sciences. Nvidia and Eli Lilly announced a co-innovation lab to drive drug discovery. Google's research arm is also using Gemma AI models for cancer therapy discovery, demonstrating how large-language and generative models can analyze biological pathways and propose novel therapeutic hypotheses.

AI is no longer a niche computational aid in early R&D. It is becoming an end-to-end operational ecosystem that supports patient selection, safety monitoring, documentation generation, trial logistics and regulatory engagement.