Insights / Industry
Field notes on Large Pharma — strategic decisions, M&A, and platform shifts inside the world's biggest drug companies.
67 posts in Large Pharma
29 Sept 2026 · 2 min read
Roche has started building autonomous AI labs, Genentech research head Aviv Regev told investors on Monday. I think the lab will turn out to be the easier part, because the decision clock is where I think most of the speed gets lost.
15 Sept 2026 · 2 min read
Lessons from the DayOne 2026 cohort session in Basel on decision-making, evidence of value and the work needed to make pharma R&D partnerships succeed.
25 Aug 2026 · 2 min read
I look at how the FDA and EMA are separately shaping rules for generative AI in regulated healthcare, from device evaluation to manufacturing. Both are converging on judging these systems by demonstrated performance for a defined use, which I think gives newer models a credible path into regulated settings.
18 Aug 2026 · 2 min read
Dario Amodei posted on X that AI could cure most human disease in 5 to 10 years, dropping the conditional framing from his own 2024 essay. I think that timeline is too optimistic, and I doubt Anthropic will become a pharma company.
11 Aug 2026 · 2 min read
Bristol Myers Squibb signed a deal on August 5 to deploy Schrödinger's agentic AI co-scientist Bunsen, which entered early access on July 27, across its research organization. I think consumption pricing will become the default model for agentic software in pharma R&D within two years, since Schrödinger's compute-metered approach got there first.
6 Aug 2026 · 2 min read
ICON plc has wired Anthropic's Claude into its Orbis platform, running trials for roughly 40,200 people across 55 countries. I argue this confirms my April prediction that CROs combining frontier AI with execution get more valuable.
31 Jul 2026 · 2 min read
Salesforce signed a contract worth up to $1.6 billion with the US Department of Veterans Affairs for agents that answer calls and schedule appointments. I read this as agentic AI in healthcare moving into the operating layer of America's largest integrated health system, starting with intake, routing, verification, and scheduling.
28 Jul 2026 · 1 min read
Eli Lilly took an equity stake in Oura this month, following GLP-1 Insights in May and free sizing kits in June. I think this shows Lilly betting that adherence and retention around GLP-1 drugs matter as much as efficacy, even without access to Oura's user data.
21 Jul 2026 · 2 min read
BMS just claimed the most powerful AI supercomputer in life sciences, the third pharma company to do so in nine months after Lilly and Roche. I read the superlative as marketing and the demand curve behind it as the signal.
18 Jul 2026 · 1 min read
Chai Discovery raised $400 million at a $3.8 billion valuation, a day after Novartis expanded its partnership, with Lilly and Pfizer already customers. I think its refusal to build its own drug pipeline, unlike Anthropic's Claude Science, is exactly why pharma trusts it with their data.
14 Jul 2026 · 1 min read
I'm marking my own homework on the five AI predictions I made for 2026: two hits, two partials, and one still too early to call at the halfway point.
9 Jul 2026 · 2 min read
In enterprise AI, switching models will soon be trivial — but leaving the platform that holds your organization's memory will be a board-level decision. I argue that the most important question in any AI evaluation isn't about benchmarks: it's about where the memory lives.
25 Jun 2026 · 1 min read
Sanofi and Pangaea Data's AATD collaboration shows where pharma AI may create near-term value: finding undiagnosed patients already visible in clinical records. In rare disease, patient identification can create patient value and market expansion at the same time.
23 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
Roughly 11,500 Novo Nordisk clinical-trial patient records are allegedly on a leak site, next to the recipe for Ozempic — and the breadth of what was taken is the real story. I argue that the same frontier AI pharma has spent two years asking what it can build is now sharpening the tools that make a terabyte of stolen files instantly usable.
18 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
This week, Merck signed a $510M AI collaboration and PE firm Altaris took Simulations Plus private for ~$375M — both bets on the infrastructure layer beneath the molecule. I think the durable value in drug discovery keeps pooling one level down: whoever owns the data generation and simulation tooling owns the part that compounds.
11 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
Deloitte's 2026 Life Sciences Outlook finds only 9% of life sciences companies see measurable business impact from AI. The companies pulling away invest in the unglamorous layer underneath: ontologies, metadata, semantics, and agent infrastructure that lets anyone build.
9 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
Anthropic benchmarked Claude Opus 4.7 against ChemDraw and MestReNova on NMR prediction and structure elucidation, and the general model matched the specialist tools. The read for techbio: encoded domain knowledge is becoming a default capability of general models.
4 Jun 2026 · 3 min read
I run my AI advisory work on a private operating system I built myself — and actually using one of these "second brain" systems has taught me that stored volume matters far less than timing. The real step change isn't buying a generic tool; it's building a system around how you actually think and work.
28 May 2026 · 3 min read
At the AI in Clinical Development Summit we hosted in New York, one line defined the room: don't get out of bed for an AI project worth less than $100 million. I walked away with four ideas about where pharma's AI transformation is actually landing — and a conviction that regulatory submissions are heading toward agent-to-agent transactions built on machine-native data standards.
21 May 2026 · 1 min read
Nature published three AI scientist systems on the same day this week — FutureHouse's Robin, Google's Co-Scientist, and ERA — and the detail that matters for pharma is what they run on. Peer review commoditised the reasoning; the real edge still sits in proprietary data and lab throughput that these systems cannot reach.
19 May 2026 · 3 min read
AstraZeneca's licensing of Owkin's K Pro platform signals where agentic AI is actually landing in pharma right now — competitive intelligence — not the broader scientific autonomy the positioning implies. I break down which workflows are realistic today and why the teams that start with unglamorous, high-leverage tasks will be best positioned when the harder problems become tractable.
12 May 2026 · 4 min read
Isomorphic Labs is in advanced talks to raise more than $2B, and I'm of two minds about it. The capital is welcome, but the deeper question is whether tech boards will stay patient through a decade of clinical iteration — and whether anyone is funding the downstream bottleneck that more AI-generated candidates will only tighten.
7 May 2026 · 3 min read
Most AI-first techbios are modeling clinical costs that are roughly half of what they will actually face — and the capital required to put an AI-derived molecule in front of a patient has roughly doubled within the lifespan of one mRNA company. Discovery cost reductions are real and welcome, but the binding constraint sits elsewhere.
5 May 2026 · 3 min read
Capital depth, role mix, and integration target. Three signals that separate a real pharma AI capability build from a press-release pilot dressed up as a strategic partnership.
30 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
The FDA's first real-time clinical trials don't just promise faster reviews — they insert a new infrastructure layer between sponsors and the agency. I break down what that architectural shift means for clinical development.
28 Apr 2026 · 4 min read
OpenEvidence has withdrawn from the EU and UK citing regulatory uncertainty around the EU AI Act, making the geography of clinical AI access officially American. I break down what this means for US and European pharma, and why the AI Act's first observable market effect may be pushing physicians toward less-grounded AI alternatives.
16 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
Last week, OpenAI made two moves in pharma within 48 hours — a flagship enterprise deal with Novo Nordisk and the launch of GPT-Rosalind — and the sequencing tells a deliberate story about how they're building a verticalised commercial infrastructure for life sciences. Having sat on the pharma buyer side, I break down what that cadence actually accomplishes.
14 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
The hyperscalers are moving on drug discovery from every direction — Anthropic acquired Coefficient Bio, and AWS just launched Amazon Bio Discovery with 40+ biological foundation models and integrated CRO partners. I still don't think the commercial model of pharma is under major threat, but the R&D part is clearly heating up massively.
7 Apr 2026 · 4 min read
Most coverage frames the Coefficient Bio acquisition as a valuation story: $44M per head, a 38,000% return, eight months old, no product, no revenue. All true. All missing the point. Anthropic bought the scientific decision layer.
7 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
Boehringer Ingelheim's new AI and machine learning center in London signals something more specific than another pharma AI announcement — pharma is starting to build permanent capability hubs, not just buy software deals. My bet is that by 2028, the companies with serious in-house computational capability will look structurally different from the ones that outsourced both talent and hardware.
31 Mar 2026 · 3 min read
Eli Lilly’s third Insilico deal in three years: $115M upfront, up to $2.75B in milestones, plus royalties. The progression from software licensing in 2023 to a $2.75B commitment in 2026 tells the real story. The signal for the rest of the AI drug discovery space is harder to read — deals like this concentrate pharma attention on proven platforms.
19 Mar 2026 · 3 min read
Five days separated Microsoft’s Copilot Health launch from Satya Nadella restructuring Copilot leadership. The official story is coherence and strategic focus. The architecture is compelling. But architecture isn’t execution. The real question is whether Microsoft can actually ship it.
17 Mar 2026 · 2 min read
Roche just announced pharma's largest hybrid-cloud AI factory, combining 2,176 new NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs with an existing footprint that now exceeds 3,500 across the U.S. and Europe. But after years of watching these waves from inside pharma, the pattern is clear: the announcement is the easy part — the hard part is getting a large organization to actually change how it works.
10 Mar 2026 · 4 min read
Three big AI drug discovery launches in 90 days: Boltz, IsoDDE, OpenFold3. Every benchmark was built by the team that built the model. The real question isn’t which model has the best benchmark. It’s whether discovery teams have a rigorous internal framework to evaluate any model that shows up. The real moat is evaluation discipline.
3 Mar 2026 · 2 min read
Lab-in-the-loop gets talked about like it’s a model problem. The Roche/Novartis/Microsoft panel at health.tech | global summit Basel made the real point clearer: it’s an operating model problem. Most orgs are at Level 1–2 maturity, and that’s already useful — the first big value isn’t more hits, it’s faster, more confident kill decisions.
26 Feb 2026 · 3 min read
Clarivate is selling its LS&H division — $390M in revenue, down 7% YoY, stock at $1.69. Decision Resources and Cortellis defined pharma intelligence for decades. GenAI-native platforms are now structuring, querying, and synthesizing across the same data at a fraction of the cost. When organized access to information is your moat, and AI organizes information better than you, that’s not a strategy problem. That’s an existential one.
24 Feb 2026 · 3 min read
Europe keeps asking “will AI in pharma R&D mean fewer jobs?” That’s the wrong question. The right one is who captures the value. Adoption is real but structurally slow. TechBio reshapes the pipeline economy. Data hunger grows. The real risk: while Europe debates headcount, the platforms and IP get built elsewhere.
19 Feb 2026 · 2 min read
Two pharma-AI deals in two weeks, two completely different architectures. Takeda paid $1.7B for Iambic. Now Merck skips techbio entirely and runs its AI models inside Mayo Clinic’s secure data environment. The architecture behind the Merck deal is what matters.
17 Feb 2026 · 2 min read
Barely a month goes by without another billion-dollar AI discovery deal. But Takeda’s deal with Iambic isn’t about buying AI — it’s about acquiring binding intelligence. If it works, portfolio strategy shifts from option value through volume to option value through precision. The hard part is industrializing it.
22 Jan 2026 · 2 min read
NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are putting $1B into a co-located Bay Area lab where Lilly scientists and NVIDIA engineers build drug discovery models side by side. Not a typical AI partnership. The real story is closed-loop discovery, and the moat is the loop, not the model.
13 Jan 2026 · 3 min read
Everyone is framing the new healthcare AI launches as ChatGPT vs Claude. That’s the wrong comparison. The real story is consumer memory vs reimbursement workflows — two completely different bets on where AI lock-in actually gets built.
11 Dec 2025 · 1 min read
My former colleagues at Novartis just signed a $1.7B deal with a seed-stage company — not for a drug or a molecule, but for targets. This signals a real shift in where pharma sees risk and is willing to pay in the value chain.
13 Nov 2025 · 1 min read
AbbVie is quietly unwinding its 11-year longevity bet with Google's (Alphabet's) Calico Life Sciences — a $1.5B collaboration started in 2014 around aging and age-related disease. I don't think this particular setback signals something more fundamental, but it raises real questions about where dedicated drug development in longevity is headed.
6 Nov 2025 · 1 min read
After working with both global pharma leaders and early-stage AI firms, I've seen a pattern: partnerships, done right, are the only scalable route to real-world adoption of AI.
4 Nov 2025 · 1 min read
Eli Lilly just moved from renting compute to owning it — 1,000+ Blackwell B300 GPUs in an on-prem DGX SuperPOD in Indianapolis. Their TuneLab initiative could turn R&D IT from a cost center into a deal channel, and it's further proof that pharma is finally taking AI seriously.
30 Oct 2025 · 1 min read
At the Global Health Exhibition in Riyadh, I moderated two panels bringing together top investors and operators to explore how AI can move from pilot to platform across pharma and care delivery — and the consensus was clear: execution, not technology, will define the winners of the next wave of digital health.
6 Oct 2025 · 1 min read
I attended an exciting panel on GenAI's impact in preclinical development, featuring voices from Novartis, Insilico Medicine, and INVIDIA. Key themes included the balance of AI opportunity and risk, the power of robotics combined with AI, and the ongoing challenge of data organization and institutional memory in the lab.
6 Oct 2025 · 1 min read
I attended an interesting talk by Roche's Pierre Fischer at BioTechX about their Data Mesh Operating model, covering domain ownership, a dedicated data marketplace, and how their platform reduced dashboard delivery from months to under a week.
30 Sept 2025 · 3 min read
I don't buy the story that AI is already driving mass job cuts at big companies — most of these restructuring announcements are regular cost-cutting dressed up with an AI angle. That said, agentic AI is getting better every day, and the real question of whether total job growth will outpace AI-driven redundancies is one even the smartest economists haven't answered yet.
18 Jun 2025 · 1 min read
I joined an interesting discussion on AI in drug discovery and development at HLTHEurope2025 with panelists from Novartis, Roche, and OWKIN. From real-world evidence generation to biomarker development and regulatory considerations, the conversation covered both the opportunities and challenges of bringing AI into pharma.
17 Jun 2025 · 1 min read
I share key learnings from the AIspotlight at HLTHEurope2025 on federated data and learning collaboration, where speakers from Roche, Charité, and beyond made the case for combining insights across institutions. A recurring theme: this shift in how we interact with health data requires clearer explanation and specific use cases for stakeholders.
3 Jun 2025 · 1 min read
The FDA is now using GenAI to review regulatory dossiers — and I think that's a good thing. Pharma companies have already been using generative AI to craft submissions, so it makes perfect sense for regulators to leverage the same technology on their end.
13 May 2025 · 1 min read
Last week at the AI in Clinical Development Summit 2025 in NYC, I joined a panel tackling the timeless build-or-buy question for pharma AI in clinical development. Our consensus: a "build with" strategy — co-developing with selected strategic AI startup partners — strikes the right balance between speed, fit, and long-term value.
3 Apr 2025 · 1 min read
Google DeepMind's spin-off Isomorphic Labs has just raised $600M from Thrive Capital and GV, the latest mega-round in the blazing AI-enabled drug discovery space. I'm watching closely to see whether bigger funding truly translates to tangible clinical results in this rapidly emerging field.
6 Mar 2025 · 1 min read
I attended a very insightful panel at the EPA conference in Amsterdam on how global healthcare reforms are impacting local market access strategy. Modeling demands are becoming more challenging, joined Health Technology Assessments are increasingly the rule, and — as Gavin Lewis of Novartis put it — your access strategy is becoming your entire enterprise strategy.
5 Dec 2024 · 1 min read
Interesting insights on the use of GenAI in Healthcare, from Bayer's Guido Mathews, Medtronic's Irina Evstifeeva and Karista's Amine Benmoussa at Health Tech Forward in Barcelona. From drug discovery and digital twins to medical imaging and workflow efficiency, the panel surfaced where GenAI is maturing — and where it still has a long way to go.
18 Nov 2024 · 1 min read
Formation Bio, in collaboration with Sanofi and OpenAI, has introduced Muse, an AI-powered tool designed to optimize patient recruitment in clinical trials. I think it will be fascinating to watch how this three-party collaboration — Big Pharma, Health Tech, and Large Tech — evolves, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more of these partnerships emerge in the coming year.
9 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
A great talk from Gilead's Jeremy Zhang at BiotechX on scaling LLMs like OpenAI and Claude to the clinical portfolio — covering key use cases from protocol design to automated document generation, and the real hurdles of stakeholder skepticism and regulatory clarity.
9 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
I attended a fascinating panel on the Hype vs Hope of AI in Drug Discovery at BiotechX in Basel this morning. The conversation surfaced some sharp insights on where AI is genuinely moving the needle in drug discovery — and where the hype still outpaces reality.
9 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
At BiotechX in Basel, Gilead's Patrick Loerch outlined what it really takes for AI to create value in biopharma — from systemic business impact to decision-making influence. I found his take on centralized vs. distributed AI models, regulatory coordination, and clinical value chain opportunities particularly compelling.
7 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
I usually avoid hyperbole, but Google's NotebookLM genuinely amazed me — I uploaded my publication on 15 Key Insights in HealthTech & Big Pharma Partnerships and it generated a full podcast with two virtual hosts discussing the key takeaways.
11 Sept 2024 · 1 min read
While Europe is still trying to implement an electronic patient record, Tencent in China is building an end-to-end digital healthcare system — a vision I saw firsthand when we at Novartis built our strategic partnership with Tencent back in 2018.
29 Aug 2024 · 1 min read
Big Pharma is increasingly jumping on the direct-to-consumer bandwagon in the U.S., with Lilly Direct, Pfizer-For-All, and others following the trail blazed by Ro and Hims/Hers. I'm asking whether this could be the moment when Pharma's business model truly evolves — and whether these companies can finally engage directly with patients.
26 Aug 2024 · 1 min read
Following Pear's bankruptcy, their FDA-cleared DTx apps reSET and reSET-O have been relaunched by PursueCare — and I think it's a timely reminder that we may have been overly optimistic about digital therapeutics succeeding independently, and that go-to-market strategy deserves an open mind.
22 Aug 2024 · 1 min read
I'm not entirely surprised by the buzz around Roche potentially selling Flatiron — transitioning to a truly data-driven, RWE-focused business model is no small feat for large pharma, and the bigger question is who will ultimately lead the large-scale RWE and curated healthcare data space.
20 Aug 2024 · 1 min read
I'm curious to see how the AI drug discovery space will evolve following the Recursion/Exscientia merger — and I'd personally bet on the traditional biotech drug-development model with AI enablement, rather than a pure SaaS or CRO play.
1 May 2024 · 2 min read
I just got back from two packed days at LSX2024 in London, where I joined panels on pharma's path to launching digital health products and shared how QuantHealth will transform clinical trial design. Here are my key takeaways from the healthtech track.