The Year of AI: 2025’s Bio/pharma Upskilling Revolution

Just past three years since the public release of ChatGPT, generative AI has mushroomed from a curiosity to a concern to a now-accepted part of everyday life. That applies as well to the various sectors of the bio/pharmaceutical industry, but not without obvious growing pains.

A Q1 2025 survey collected by The Pistoia Alliance and the Copyright Clearance Center revealed that 51% of respondents felt that resistance to change would be the biggest barrier to AI-led innovation; by Q4, KPMG’s poll of more than 100 life sciences CEOs found that 76% felt their organizations were moving at the right pace to handle the speed of AI developments. Clearly, the pace of AI growth continues unabated.

The following serves as a review of industry-wide AI adoption efforts in 2025, as covered by the staff of PharmTech®.

What partnerships were formed in 2025 with AI as a common denominator?

Companies agreed to collaborate on a wide range of AI applications over the past 12 months. In the first week of the year, PostEra and Pfizer said they would partner to leverage PostEra’s AI platform in the advancement of a number of programs, including small-molecule therapeutics and antibody-drug conjugates.

Incyte and Genesis Therapeutics announced a strategic collaboration to research, discover, and develop novel small-molecule medicines with the help of generative and predictive AI. Paige, a next-generation AI technology specialist, agreed to integrate its state-of-the-art foundation models with Sonrai Analytics’ intuitive cloud-based data analysis and bioinformatics platform to harness emerging AI capabilities for R&D of precision medicines.

China-based CSPC Pharmaceuticals entered into a strategic research collaboration with AstraZeneca, using CSPC’s AI-driven, dual-engine efficient drug discovery platform to analyze binding patterns of target proteins with existing compound molecules and carry out targeted optimization. Siemens AG completed a $5.1 billion acquisition of Dotmatics, expanding Siemens’ AI-driven product lifecycle management portfolio into the life sciences domain.

A collaboration between Proteros biostructures GmbH, Qanatpharma, Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), and Enamine was launched to leverage innovations from all four partners—notably, ZIB’s AI-based generative ligand design—to accelerate discovery of novel therapeutics targeting cerebral perfusion deficits associated with subarachnoid hemorrhage. And Almirall selected a second dermatology target in its ongoing AI drug discovery collaboration with Absci.

What are key opinion leaders saying about their companies’ readiness?

PharmTech® made the AI revolution a key talking point in its conversations with industry professionals in 2025, particularly at the various conferences and tradeshows held throughout the year. The team asked about the projections and pitfalls that have previously been mentioned—namely the role AI is playing in accelerating drug discovery and improving manufacturing efficiency, and any unresolved barriers to full adoption.

Among many insightful interviews conducted throughout 2025, standouts included Peter Sarvey of Automation NTH, at INTERPHEX in New York City; Parenteral Drug Association President and CEO Glenn Wright, at the PDA Regulatory Conference in Washington, DC; Jennifer Cannon, PhD, of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Gustavo Ferrer, MD, of Dr. Ferrer BioPharma and Moxie Health Group, Eva-Marie Hempe of NVIDIA, and J.D. Mowery of Bora Pharmaceuticals, at CPHI Frankfurt; and Mark Arnold, PhD, of Bioanalytical Solution Integration, Sanjay Konagurthu, PhD, of Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Long Yuan, PhD, of Biogen, at AAPS PharmSci 360 in San Antonio, Texas.

These conferences also contained numerous presentations and panel discussions putting AI in the spotlight. At PDA, presenters discussed how data-driven AI can transform quality control and quality assurance, as well as general adoption strategies. A CPHI panel discussion took a deep dive into AI’s impact on the pharma workforce and hiring. And at AAPS, a presentation somewhat more technical in nature explored AI approaches with poorly soluble drugs in order to support early decision making.

How have regulatory authorities handled the paradigm shift?

FDA has taken steps to embrace AI in 2025, announcing in December that it will be providing agency staff with agentic AI capabilities that will enable creation of complex AI workflows, harness AI models, and assist with multi-step tasks, part of FDA’s initiative to embed AI more deeply into workflows to achieve operational efficiency.

Earlier, in July 2025, the agency said its Innovative Science and Technology Approaches for New Drugs pilot program, or ISTAND, which was launched in November 2020, would transition to a permanent drug development tool qualification program, including the leveraging of digital health technologies such as AI-based algorithms or wearables used for patient assessment.

With an eye on international interconnectivity, Boston-based ArisGlobal said in February 2025 that it had signed the AI Pact—the first comprehensive regulation of AI worldwide by a major regulator—a voluntary framework created by the European Commission for stakeholders to prepare for the European Union’s implementation of its AI Act.

What are big tech and academia doing to assist pharma’s AI transition?

Built on its Gemini platform, Google introduced its AI co-scientist, a multi-agent AI system that can help scientists navigate information and insights from scientific publications and other resources, in February 2025.

In April 2025, SkyCell announced that it would be collaborating with Microsoft to integrate SkyMind, SkyCell’s AI-powered supply chain solution, with Microsoft Teams and Copilot based on Azure OpenAI Service, enabling those working in the pharmaceutical supply chain to access real-time shipment data, predictive insights, and automated alerts within a Microsoft system.

Meanwhile, two institutes of higher education, the University of Oxford and the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), said in September 2025 that Oxford had agreed to lend its expertise in human challenge studies, immune science, and vaccine development to a strategic partnership using EIT’s cutting-edge AI innovation technology for an ambitious new program of vaccine research.

What’s next?

In the fall of 2025, ArisGlobal’s Jason Bryant authored an exclusive, three-part series for PharmTech® that asks and answers what might be reasonable to expect from agentic AI’s deployment within pharma as the technology currently stands. Bryant has also sat for a series of video interviews expanding upon these contributions; look for them here in the coming days.

Additionally, Jayaprakash Nair, head of AI and analytics at Altimetrik, has written a piece on the importance of smaller, domain-specific models for AI agents in pharma, at a time when large-language models are still getting most of the attention.

While these articles present a solid body of evidence inside the crystal ball of AI, the rapid pace of its ongoing adoption in the industry throughout 2025 may mean that there is some unpredictability in store for the turns the technology will take in 2026. But if 2025 has provided any sort of lesson, being prepared and adaptable as the calendar turns over are the best bets for success in the new year.

This article was written entirely without the assistance of AI.