Accenture boosts pharmaceutical and biotech with niche offerings

Recently, on January 8th, 2024, Accenture made a strategic investment in QuantHealth through Accenture Ventures. QuantHealth is an AI-powered clinical trial design company that helps to predict trial outcomes with significant accuracy and lower potential costs of drug discovery. It is part of Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, which works with startups that address areas of significant strategic importance for Accenture’s enterprise clients, including closing the skills gap, data sovereignty, the future of work, edge systems at scale, and predictive systems.

The story of failed clinical trials

According to the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 90% of clinical-stage development drugs never reach FDA approval and commercialization. Exhibit 1 shows drug candidates’ cycle time and probability of success over phases of drug development.

Exhibit 1: Clinical drug development is a complex process with a success rate of just 10%

Source: ASBMB, HFS Research, 2024

Exhibit 2 provides the four primary reasons for the low approval rate.

Exhibit 2: Detailed look at multifaceted causes of clinical trial failures

Source: ASBMB, HFS Research, 2024

For any firm, having a drug reach the clinical trial stage is significant, considering it takes at least five to seven years to have that drug at that stage. Clinical trial failures result in investment loss, a reduction in the drug pipeline, and a potential hit to stock price.

Firms have been leveraging AI to accelerate drug development

The advent of newer technology like generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), genomics, blockchain, and cloud computing, along with the development of AI algorithms, promises to speed up the development of drugs. Recent developments have shown the advantage of advanced AI algorithms that can analyze chemical compound databases and predict a compound’s toxicity and potential side effects. AI has also been helping with patient recruitment and data collection and providing insight into participant behavior.

QuantHealth is trying to solve an old problem with a new approach

QuantHealth uses a large healthcare model (LHM) that learns patient-drug interactions, driving high-resolution outcome models. The model combines more than 1 trillion data points across the clinical and pharmacological domains to optimize clinical development. These data points cover more than 350 million patients, 100,000 distinct molecules, and 180,000 clinical trials.

QuantHealth AI helps prevent the failures discussed in Exhibit 2, helping improve outcomes related to clinical efficacy, toxicity and side effects, pharmacokinetics, and a lack of commercial interest or strategic planning parameters. QuantHealth AI can use its biosimulation and in-silico trials to impact clinical efficacy and pharmacokinetic properties along with AI to analyze data to know the side effects of the drug,

QuantHealth partnered with Sanofi, Boston Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, Morphosis, and 4P Pharma to simulate clinical trials. A QuantHealth product, Clinical Trial Simulator, allows pharma and biotech partners to predict trial outcomes with significant accuracy and lower potential costs of drug discovery. It can enable running thousands of protocol variations to uncover optimal trial design for success, helping R&D teams more accurately and rapidly predict clinical trial results. These results decide whether a trial should proceed and whether drugs can be repurposed.

The QuantHealth Synthetic Evidence Generation platform can predict treatment efficacy at different stages of clinical testing. It can help plan drug trials, choose conditions the drug could treat, and find new uses for existing drugs.

The Bottom Line: QuantHealth can help Accenture’s pharmaceutical and biotech clients by improving the predictability of drug trials.

QuantHealth can add significant value to Accenture by giving it access to data for clinical trials. QuantHealth solutions, such as the QuantHealth Clinical Trial Simulator and Synthetic Evidence Generation Platform, can enhance Accenture’s pharmaceutical and biotech-related offerings by giving it access to data-driven insights needed to optimize outcomes and maximize chances of drug success.