Irish clinical research company ICON has signed a multi-year deal to bring Anthropic’s Claude AI capabilities to its agentic AI platform, Orbis.
Through this collaboration, ICON will work closely with Anthropic’s Life Sciences research team to explore and apply new technologies to assist innovation across clinical development.
The collaboration is expected to enhance study planning, optimise trial protocols, predict enrolment risks, and streamline internal workflows
The new deal will see ICON build on four core production capabilities within Orbis, including enhancing its OneSearch and OnePlan tools with model reasoning for site selection and study planning, deploying real-time predictive intelligence to detect enrolment risks and operational signals, and using AI for protocol design and scenario modelling to minimise amendments and expedite study startup.
The company will also embed its clinical expertise into client systems so that customers can directly access insights via Claude.
The company intends to roll out Claude throughout its organisation according to job roles, including Claude Code for developers, Claude Science for clinical and scientific staff, and Claude for knowledge teams.
In a statement, ICON said the collaboration directly supports three foundational areas of its AI strategy. Anthropic’s frontier models will strengthen the intelligence layer that powers Orbis, connecting ICON’s expertise, data and AI across the trial lifecycle so that teams can make better and faster decisions for customers.
The deployment of Claude capabilities across ICON’s developer and knowledge teams will drive productivity by automating high-volume, repeatable activity and redirecting human expertise to higher-value work. ICON will also develop and deploy domain-specific agents embedded directly within clinical development workflows.
Barry Balfe, CEO of ICON, 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.”
Pip White, Head of Ireland, UK and Northern Europe at Anthropic said: “AI holds real potential to address long-standing challenges in clinical development and make a measurable difference for patients.”
“Far too often, the barrier to getting medicines to patients faster is operational, not scientific. Take study enrolment as an example – it’s one of the biggest bottlenecks in clinical development and causes delays in up to 80 per cent 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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