Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo was held from April 2nd to 4th, 2025, in Boston. It brought together an innovation ecosystem of investors, TechBios, and life sciences tech companies, a few system integrators, and biotechs and big pharma. The floor buzzed with discussions around innovation, partnering, and technology disruption. Twenty-eight hundred life sciences and IT executives from 30 countries were out there to explore and shape the future of life sciences innovation.
Kshitij Kumar, CEO, Clovertex noted Bill Gates statement that despite the AI revolution, 3 roles that will remain essential include coders, energy experts, and biologists. So, folks in the life sciences industry, we are in the good place! Important points that came up in the keynote including ‘How do you measure the probability of success when building or investing in a company? How do you maintain the balance between speed vs perfection? How do you continue to build and manage risks, especially when, in the life sciences industry, regulatory and scientific risk is higher than market risk? As Sonya Makhni medical director, Mayo Clinic, called out ‘Develop your own risk stratification strategy for clinical and technical risk’. Subha Madhavan, VP and head AI, Pfizer noted ‘Creating regulatory grade RWD will occupy our mind for the next few years’.
The Cambridge Venture Innovation and Partnering (VIP) forum was full of deep discussions where investors provided some invaluable guidance to the startup community of life sciences tech companies and Techbios on what were the critical aspects guiding their investment decisions, how AI adoption impacted these decisions and what were the critical factors impacting partnering decisions with biopharma.
Since tech investors were seen to focus on business fundamentals, while biotech investors were seen to focus on the data that TechBios generated, the importance of clearly articulating ones value proposition so that it resonated with investors was emphasized. Pharma stressed that it looks for first in class or best in class assets that have ideally been already approved – asset differentiation is key. Having an asset in hand would save spend on time and money spent on the discovery process and this is the differentiator that TechBios would bring to the table.
Notably, the timeline to demonstrate success is getting shorter and shorter, speed is a differentiator, and investors are monitoring this carefully. Establishing key partnerships with pharma would significantly enhance the valuation of TechBios. Life sciences tech companies on the other hand should focus on hiring life sciences domain experts who can train models and should have people on their boards who can determine product fit rather than those who can develop the product. VC firms called out that 2025 would be about GenAI for small molecules, while 2026 would be about AI driven intelligent lab automation.
Finally, it was not just about building the technical infrastructure, but also about building a nimble culture and an agile culture to swiftly capture the right opportunities. Biopharma companies were also advised to rethink their budgeting strategies and to factor in the spend on IT infrastructure in the cost of developing a new molecule.
Drew Dresser, Sr Director AI and Cloud Engineering, Flagship Pioneering spoke about how Flagship was building a digital backbone including scientific computing, a cloud foundation, scientific data models, and workflow orchestration engines across its portfolio of 35 companies. He touched upon the rise in Bio FMs and how biotech innovation lives in the cloud, the evolving role of AI co-scientists, such as Google AI co-scientist and the Allen AI Ai2’s code scientist, and how the role of agents will move beyond transactional activities to playing a role in hypothesis creation.
Abbvie presented its CSR authoring solution. Tobi Guennel, SVP product innovation Quartz Bio, presented its precision medicine AI platform which leverages a series of agents including orchestration agents, DM and Intelligence Agents, Auxiliary agents, Navigator agents and more, where all agents are embedded in the fabric. He reports that this resulted in a two-fold increase in speed from data to insights and a 25% increase in R&D output. Illumina highlighted that multiomics is at the core of identifying targets for cancer vaccines, and it emphasized the importance of the use of AI in spatial genomics to determine where the target is located in the tumor.
ConcertAI, which positions itself as an oncology GenAI company, discussed how it has partnered with NVIDIA to build its platform with a multi-agentic framework and proprietary SLMs and LLMs to support oncology clinical trials. It forecasts that by 2027, domain-specific GenAI tools that are fine-tuned for pharma applications will deliver a 3-5-fold higher ROI than general purpose foundation models, particularly in regulatory-sensitive contexts.
On a separate note, Joan Chambers, Senior Consultant, Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, presented findings from the Partnership for Advancing Clinical Trials (PACT), survey in which 15 biotechs and pharmas had participated, and noted that 75% considered hybrid decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) as a strategic objective and that they will use DCTs in more than 45% of their trials in the coming 5 years.
Be it drug discovery, or drug development, GenAI and agents are leading the way. Life sciences is adopting AI at the speed of thought and slowly but surely, making precision medicine a reality. As Bill Fitzgerald head biotech markets Google Cloud aptly put it, ‘If AI were a drinking game, most people wouldn’t make it to breakfast’.
“What really stood out at the BioIT event was the sharp appetite in the industry for implementing GenAI/agents to transform drug discovery and drug development, the focused yet nuanced investment strategies of VC firms for investing in TechBios vs life sciences tech companies, and the realization that for once, the entire innovation ecosystem, including regulators, is working together to accelerate disruptive innovation in the life sciences industry”, said Dr. Nimita Limaye, Research VP, Life Sciences, R&D Strategy and Technology, IDC.
