AstraZeneca has partnered with Oracle to explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and real-world health data to improve clinical trial recruitment, strengthen safety monitoring and connect medical research more closely with patient care.
Announced on October 20, 2026, the collaboration combines AstraZeneca’s scientific, clinical development and regulatory expertise with Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, healthcare data and AI-enabled clinical capabilities. The companies have signed a non-binding term sheet, and financial details have not been disclosed.
The first planned programme will be conducted in Abu Dhabi in partnership with healthcare company M42. It aims to help clinical teams identify patients with uncontrolled hypertension, support guideline-directed treatment and improve recruitment for clinical trials.
The wider collaboration will explore applications across oncology, cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases, respiratory and immunology, and rare diseases. Other potential areas include earlier diagnosis and the use of real-world evidence throughout a medicine’s lifecycle.
Patient recruitment remains a major challenge in drug development, as identifying eligible participants can delay studies and increase costs. The companies intend to investigate how AI and healthcare data could help clinicians identify suitable candidates earlier and make clinical research more efficient.
The partners also plan to explore a continuous-learning approach in which insights from clinical trials and routine healthcare inform future research, safety monitoring and patient care.
The collaboration will use de-identified real-world data under privacy, security and governance safeguards. AstraZeneca will not receive patient-identifiable information, and each proposed project will require separate legal, regulatory, ethical and institutional reviews before proceeding.
The agreement marks another step in the pharmaceutical industry’s adoption of AI beyond drug discovery, although the proposed initiatives will need to demonstrate their effectiveness in clinical practice.
Written by: Pramit Hazra
Graphics by: Pramit Hazra
