At Merck, Business Development As Usual?

Despite limited evidence of commercial impact, pharmaceutical companies are making massive strategic investments in AI biologics platforms. The question isn't whether the technology shows promise; it's whether that promise can translate to measurable business results.

Against a backdrop of shifting trade policies, the end of multilateral market approaches and renewed focus on supply chain resilience, medtechs are doubling down on innovation in products and processes – using AI – and keeping unmet needs and outcomes in the center of the target.

While biopharma companies experiment with genAI, agentic AI is rapidly shifting the work paradigm towards one of autonomous digital workers that can handle entire process flows.

Biotech companies are pursuing diverse AI strategies beyond expensive custom data generation: foundation model fine-tuning, data-efficient computational methods and targeted proprietary datasets. In Vivo takes a look at some examples.