Modella AI has signed a multi-year agreement with AstraZeneca to expedite AI-driven oncology clinical development.

The partnership will give AstraZeneca access to Modella AI’s multi-modal foundation models.

The agreement will enable the use of Modella AI’s latest models, with rich feature extraction from different types of data, to speed up clinical development across AstraZeneca’s worldwide oncology portfolio.

AstraZeneca oncology research and development (R&D) chief AI and data scientist Jorge Reis-Filho stated: “At AstraZeneca, AI is integrated across every aspect of clinical development.

“Through the use of foundation models, combined with our unique datasets and AI expertise, we are confident in our strategy to accelerate development and increase the probabilities of success in our oncology clinical trials.”

AstraZeneca will use Modella AI’s platform for cancer research R&D capabilities to improve biomarker discovery and clinical development while enhancing patient outcomes.

By integrating these advanced foundation models into its R&D pipeline, AstraZeneca seeks to enable data-driven discovery methods with increased speed.

Modella AI CEO Jill Stefanelli stated: “Foundation models are transforming precision medicine. They are the backbone of AI-powered biomedical discovery and mark the first step toward fully autonomous AI agents.

“Our state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models provide powerful features from different data types for downstream tasks. When integrated with AstraZeneca’s research engine, they will have the potential to accelerate data-driven development and enable the development of new AI agents that can automate complex R&D workflows.”

In June 2025, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo's Datroway (datopotamab deruxtecan) for the treatment of adults with locally advanced or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that exhibits mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor.