Pharmaceuticals and biotech / Drug discovery
AstraZeneca: Querying clinical and regulatory data
- Company
- AstraZeneca
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
AstraZeneca's clinical trial programmes run in many countries at once. Systems are correspondingly scattered, which created bottlenecks in analysis and decision making. Clinical staff spent hours gathering material by hand to answer questions such as which trial sites are performing well.
Technology and data
AstraZeneca built Development Assistant together with AWS. Using Amazon Bedrock Agents, a supervisor agent routes a natural language question to the right specialist agent. The specialist agents include a terminology agent that resolves pharmaceutical abbreviations, a clinical data agent, a regulatory agent and a database operations agent. Input material is supplied by the internal Drug Development Data Platform, or 3DP, which gathers data from clinical, regulatory, quality and safety systems and turns it into data products aligned to a common vocabulary. When a question comes in, the system adds domain terminology, generates SQL, runs it and returns the result. It also shows which data tables were used and how the result was produced.
Results
AstraZeneca said it took six months from concept to production. It said security checks and AI governance review were completed within that period as well. A company research and development IT executive said information checks that used to take hours now come back in minutes. It said the scope of use is being widened to more than 1,000 users.
Limits and open questions
This case is about the speed of checking information, and there are no figures showing that drug approvals or clinical success rates improved. The figure of more than 1,000 users includes a target still being rolled out.
Sources
- Using Amazon Bedrock Agents to Accelerate Decisions Across Drug Development at AstraZenecaaws.amazon.com, Accessed
- Highlights from the 2025 AWS Life Sciences Symposium’s Clinical Trials track | AWS for Industriesaws.amazon.com.cdn.amazon.com, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.