ICON to Deploy Claude AI Across Clinical Trial Lifecycle

Editor’s Take: From drug formulation to workflow automation, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming life sciences. ICON is the latest company to expand its adoption of AI.

ICON plc has entered a multi-year collaboration with Anthropic to bring Claude’s AI capabilities across the clinical trial lifecycle—further advancing ICON’s digital innovation and AI strategy, and building on Orbis, ICON’s secure, governed, agentic AI platform.

Through this collaboration, ICON will work closely with Anthropic’s Life Sciences research team to explore and apply technologies with the goal of accelerating innovation across clinical development.

Barry Balfe, CEO of ICON plc, said, “We are determined to lead AI acceleration of clinical trials. Working with Anthropic gives us direct access to frontier AI capability and the people who build it. By combining ICON’s clinical development expertise, global delivery model and proprietary trial intelligence with Anthropic’s frontier AI capabilities, we believe we can help sponsors make better decisions earlier, execute studies with greater precision and ultimately accelerate the delivery of medicines to patients.”

How Claude Will Be Deployed

With support from Anthropic, ICON will develop four production capabilities within Orbis:

• Site intelligence and study planning: powering ICON’s OneSearch and OnePlan tools with frontier model reasoning to sharpen site selection and study feasibility.
• Orbis predictive intelligence: enabling real-time detection of enrollment risks, trends and operational signals across active studies.
• Protocol optimization: applying AI to protocol design and scenario modelling to reduce amendments and accelerate study startup.
• Ecosystem integration: integrating ICON’s clinical expertise into client systems, allowing them to securely access ICON’s insights directly within Claude.

ICON will deploy Claude across the organization through a targeted, role-based rollout: Claude Code for developers, Claude for knowledge teams, and Claude Science for scientific and clinical teams for maximum value creation.

“AI holds real potential to address long-standing challenges in clinical development and make a measurable difference for patients,” said Pip White, Head of Ireland, UK and Northern Europe, Anthropic. “Far too often, the barrier to getting medicines to patients faster is operational, not scientific. Take study enrollment as an example – it’s one of the biggest bottlenecks in clinical development and causes delays in up to 80% of trials. This is exactly the kind of operational challenge that ICON’s trial-delivery expertise, paired with Claude, is well suited to address.”

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Earlier this year, BMS announced plans to deploy Claude across its research, clinical development, manufacturing, commercial, and corporate functions.