AstraZeneca and Oracle announced a non-binding agreement on 20 October to explore AI and real-world data for clinical trials, Oracle said in an announcement issued from Austin and Abu Dhabi. The first project will support hypertension research in Abu Dhabi with M42, a UAE healthcare company, Reuters reported.
Key points
- Oracle says the companies will explore using AI and health data to help care teams find eligible trial patients earlier.
- The agreement is non-binding. Oracle says the partners plan to agree on measures for assessing the work.
- The initial project will support hypertension research in Abu Dhabi alongside M42.
- AstraZeneca is targeting more than $80 billion in annual revenue by 2030.
Oracle’s proposal for patient matching
Oracle says the companies plan to explore potential uses of applications and AI to help care teams identify eligible trial patients earlier. It expects to combine its health data, cloud, analytics and clinical workflow capabilities with AstraZeneca’s drug-development expertise. The work is intended to connect research findings with decisions made during routine care, according to the announcement.
Oracle lists oncology; cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases; respiratory and immunology; and rare diseases among the areas that could be explored. Reuters describes the initial work as covering cancer, cardiovascular, respiratory, immunology and rare diseases. The disease lists accompany a proposed collaboration rather than a binding programme of trials.
Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s chief executive, said the companies could help clinicians find patients sooner, improve trials and generate evidence throughout a medicine’s development and use. Oracle chief executive Mike Sicilia said linking the drugmaker’s scientific work with Oracle’s data and healthcare capabilities offered an opportunity to connect more patients with trials and bring research insights into care sooner.
Oracle says the partners intend to put joint oversight, repeatable engineering building blocks and mutually set performance metrics in place. Those measures would be used to assess results before the companies decide whether successful approaches could extend to other disease areas and locations. Seema Verma, executive vice-president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said the work would operate under the governance of the health systems providing care.
M42 project begins with hypertension research
The Abu Dhabi project gives the proposed collaboration an initial research setting. Difficulties enrolling patients can lengthen clinical trials and increase development costs. AstraZeneca is looking to use AI and real-world data to identify eligible participants and monitor safety signals, among other uses.
Anne-Claire Gerbaldi, AstraZeneca’s chief digital, data and AI officer, said the companies aim to support more effective trials, strengthen safety monitoring and help patients receive diagnoses sooner. Her comments concern what the partners hope to achieve through the agreement. Oracle also says it wants findings from clinical research and routine care to inform later study design and patient care.
Oracle says its contribution will include data, cloud, AI and clinical workflow capabilities. AstraZeneca brings the scientific and therapeutic work, according to the companies’ announcement. Their proposed outcome measures would provide a basis for deciding whether an approach used in one setting should be extended elsewhere.
AstraZeneca’s AI deals and $80 billion target
The Oracle agreement follows other AstraZeneca AI arrangements in 2026. The drugmaker struck deals with Owkin to use its AI Scientist platform and with Evinova to apply its AI platform to clinical development, Fierce Biotech reported. Those initiatives sit alongside AstraZeneca’s own use of algorithms to identify patients considered more likely to respond to treatment.
Fierce Biotech reported that AstraZeneca’s open-source generative AI framework, Reinvent, has cut by half the period spent finding molecule designs that might lead to new medicines. The company also aims for its AI Development Agent eventually to halve chemistry, manufacturing and controls development time. Those are separate drug-development applications from the patient-recruitment work proposed with Oracle.
Oracle launched its Life Sciences AI Data Platform earlier in 2026, promoting its use of generative AI and AI agents for drug development, clinical trials and safety monitoring, Fierce Biotech reported. The AstraZeneca arrangement would apply Oracle’s health-data and workflow capabilities to research involving a drugmaker and, in Abu Dhabi, a healthcare provider.
AstraZeneca is seeking to expand its medicine portfolio as it targets more than $80 billion in annual revenue by 2030, Reuters reported. The company has previously faced delays involving a breast cancer drug and the failure of a nerve disorder treatment associated with trial-design problems.
