Signal Pharma companies report agents already running medical writing and analysis tasks

Summary

Drug companies report that AI agents are already handling parts of research administration such as medical writing. CB Insights says pharma leaders are looking for tools that work beside researchers and take on tedious tasks like data cleaning, preliminary analysis and report writing. Matt Studney, who leads global R&D IT at MSD Research Labs, said agents are already deployed in development workflows. In medical writing, these agents look up and assemble knowledge and evaluate drafts written by both people and AI. Lilly similarly described future scientific agents as digital assistants that help researchers think through problems and plan experiments. The examples show agents entering pharma through support roles before taking on core scientific decisions.