Novo Nordisk Transforms Clinical Trials With AI

Novo Nordisk's clinical trial data was scattered across siloed systems with limited governance, slowing collaboration and research timelines. The company built two platforms on Databricks: FounData for secondary use of clinical trial data and DataCore for trial conduct management, using Unity Catalog, Agent Bricks (powering a 'Co-Scientist' AI agent system), Model Serving, and AI/BI Genie across a hybrid Data Mesh spanning eight cloud regions. It took 9 months from concept to MVP launch, and active use of clinical data across the development organization rose from about 1% to 20%, with 1,000 users on FounData and 80+ live AI/ML collaborations. Databricks projects $157M+ in net new value over five years and $14M in operational efficiency gains.

Databricks is a unified data-and-AI lakehouse platform, used across pharma R&D for everything from early prototyping to production model governance via Unity Catalog.

This sits in the Design & Stress-Test stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the tools pharma teams use to scope, prototype and benchmark an AI use case before committing to build it — data-catalog, sandbox and evaluation platforms.