A global biopharmaceutical company focused on science-led innovation, AstraZeneca aims to transform healthcare by leveraging scientific advancements and emerging technologies. The company integrates data science and AI into its R&D to enhance drug development and understanding of diseases. In 2024, AstraZeneca established a new strategic R&D center in Shanghai, marking a significant step in its global expansion.

AstraZeneca has expanded its global presence by establishing R&D centers and manufacturing facilities in China to utilize local capabilities and market opportunities. A key imperative for multinational pharmaceutical companies in China is complying with local regulatory requirements, such as reporting adverse drug reactions (ADR) to the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA). This process is time-consuming for medical researchers, who must gather and analyze medical literature from healthcare professionals and institutions to create reports that meet strict regulatory standards, including specific formatting and editorial guidelines.

Alibaba Group is a key player in digitalization in China and globally, with a strong history of integrating AI across multiple industry sectors. Alibaba Cloud, the technology backbone of the group, plays a significant role in AI-driven innovation in China, supporting over 80% of China's tech businesses and more than 50% of LLM-based innovations. A leading LLM in China and globally, Tongyi Qwen offers various model sizes and multi-modal features, and is ideal for cross-lingual scenarios.

Working with Alibaba Cloud, AstraZeneca's team has built the industry’s first adverse event summary system based on Tongyi Qwen LLM and Dedicated Model Studio. The system makes full use of the AI engineering capabilities provided by Alibaba Cloud's Dedicated Model Studio, integrating AstraZeneca's private knowledge bases and publicly available medical and pharmacological knowledge.

With Alibaba Cloud’s AI engineering platform, both development and administration tasks are now more streamlined.

AstraZeneca’s researchers can create tasks and input documents into the system, which generates an adverse event report, based on the source information. The report only needs a human review and minimal edits before sign-off.

Private deployment on the cloud, leveraging Dedicated Model Studio, allows AstraZeneca to leverage the scalability and stability of using the cloud-based solution. This ensures a more stringent data and system segregation, while crucially safeguarding data privacy.

Thanks to Alibaba Cloud’s LLM-based system, accuracy of the adverse event reports has increased from 90% to 95%.

As the system can quickly comb through vast amounts of medical literature and formulate output documents according to the requirements, efficiency in creating the adverse event reports has increased by 300%.

Working with Alibaba Cloud, AstraZeneca has proudly made this pioneering solution the first of its kind in the pharmaceutical industry, which will empower pharmaceutical businesses and enhance safety for patients. The company is looking forward to pioneering more AI-driven innovations, by leveraging its industrial expertise in concert with Alibaba Cloud's cutting-edge technologies for greater digitalization.