Tens of billions of euros are spent each year on drug research and development across the globe — but only a few dozen new drugs make it to market.
Agentic AI is introducing a rhythm shift in the pharmaceutical industry, with IQVIA, the world’s leading provider of clinical research services, commercial insights and healthcare intelligence, as its conductor.
At NVIDIA GTC Paris at VivaTech, IQVIA announced it is launching multiple AI orchestrator agents in collaboration with NVIDIA. These specialized agentic systems are designed to manage and accelerate complex pharmaceutical development workflows for IQVIA’s thousands of pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device customers across the globe.
The AI agents act as supervisors for a group of sub-agents that each specialize in different tasks, like a conductor managing strings, woodwinds, bass and percussion sections. The orchestrator agent routes any necessary actions — like speech-to-text transcription, clinical coding, structured data extraction and data summarization — to the appropriate sub-agent, ensuring that each step in the complex workflow is accelerated and managed by human experts in the loop.
Using its vast databases comprising many petabytes of data and deep domain life sciences expertise, IQVIA can train and fine-tune these models for maximum productivity and efficiency.
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.
AI Agents Compose New Paths for Drug Commercialization
After a drug passes clinical trials, there’s still more work to be done before it’s accessible to patients.
Pharmaceutical companies must understand the market for their drug, landscape the disease it treats, map the patient journey and chart treatment pathways. The goal is to identify the right patient cohorts and understand how to reach them effectively.
“There are a lot of different components — market dynamics, patient behaviors, access challenges and the competitive landscape — that you need to triangulate to really understand where the bottlenecks are,” Roy said.
IQVIA orchestrator agents can provide a comprehensive understanding of how a treatment will reach patients by analyzing patient records, prescriptions and lab results in just a few days instead of weeks.
Another challenge is to capture the attention of healthcare professionals. To stand out, field teams often spend hours preparing for every interaction — crafting personalized, data-driven conversations that can deliver real value.
The IQVIA field companion orchestrator agent delivers tailored insights to pharmaceutical sales teams before each engagement with healthcare providers. By integrating physician demographics, digital behavior, prescribing patterns and patient dynamics, the agent helps field teams prepare for each meeting using near real-time insights, leading to more engaging and impactful discussions.
“The collective impact of these agents across numerous commercial workflows brings unprecedented precision and operational efficiency to the life sciences, supporting better experiences and outcomes for healthcare professionals and patients,” Roy said.
Learn more about the latest AI advancements for healthcare and other industries at NVIDIA GTC Paris, running through Thursday, June 12, at VivaTech.
Watch the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at VivaTech 2025, and explore GTC Paris sessions.