Novo Nordisk accelerates clinical insight with custom agents on Azure
Novo Nordisk A/S· DenmarkMicrosoft Azure · Microsoft AI Acceleration Studio
Novo Nordisk wanted to accelerate pharmaceutical R&D decision-making by helping researchers explore and validate clinical hypotheses faster using AI-assisted quantitative analysis. Working with Microsoft's AI Acceleration Studio (Forward Deployed Engineering team), Novo Nordisk built a governed reasoning agent on Azure, drawing on its FounData initiative which harmonized more than 200,000 patient-years of clinical trial data aligned to CDISC, SDTM, and ADaM industry standards. The agent lets researchers ask complex scientific questions in natural language and generate and execute code against proprietary clinical datasets, with human-in-the-loop validation by biostatisticians before outputs influence decisions. Before production rollout, the teams ran thousands of automated tests and layered evaluation systems. The solution is reducing time to insight from weeks to minutes and increasing the number of scientific questions teams can evaluate from roughly 5-10 strong ideas per quarter to 50+.
Overview
Novo Nordisk wanted to accelerate pharmaceutical R&D decision-making by helping researchers explore and validate clinical hypotheses faster using AI-assisted quantitative analysis. Working with Microsoft's AI Acceleration Studio (Forward Deployed Engineering team), Novo Nordisk built a governed reasoning agent on Azure, drawing on its FounData initiative which harmonized more than 200,000 patient-years of clinical trial data aligned to CDISC, SDTM, and ADaM industry standards. The agent lets researchers ask complex scientific questions in natural language and generate and execute code against proprietary clinical datasets, with human-in-the-loop validation by biostatisticians before outputs influence decisions. Before production rollout, the teams ran thousands of automated tests and layered evaluation systems. The solution is reducing time to insight from weeks to minutes and increasing the number of scientific questions teams can evaluate from roughly 5-10 strong ideas per quarter to 50+.
The challenge
Novo Nordisk faced growing pressure to extract more value from decades of clinical research data fast enough to influence critical scientific and business decisions. Answering a single scientific question required coordination across medical experts, commercial stakeholders, project managers, data scientists, and specialized biostatisticians, and teams could spend months evaluating whether a hypothesis was even worth pursuing, sometimes discovering late in the process that there was insufficient evidence to proceed.
The solution
Working with Microsoft's AI Acceleration Studio (Forward Deployed Engineering team), Novo Nordisk built a governed reasoning agent on Azure, drawing on its FounData initiative which harmonized more than 200,000 patient-years of clinical trial data aligned to CDISC, SDTM, and ADaM industry standards. The agent lets researchers ask complex scientific questions in natural language and generate and execute code against proprietary clinical datasets, with human-in-the-loop validation by biostatisticians before outputs influence decisions. Before production rollout, the teams ran thousands of automated tests and layered evaluation systems combining query validation, system performance metrics, expert review, and continuous user feedback.
Reported business value
The solution is reducing time to insight from weeks to minutes for many exploratory analyses and increasing the number of scientific questions teams can evaluate from roughly 5-10 strong ideas per quarter to 50+.
Sources
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Other pharmaceuticals entries in the register.
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AstraZenecaAmazon Bedrock Agents · Amazon Bedrock · Text-to-SQLWas this helpful?
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