A year after unveiling its AI Agency platform, Eversana has reeled in its first publicly named pharma partner with brain disease specialist Lundbeck signing on to use the AI commercialization digs across its U.S. commercial organization.
Lundbeck is going all in on Eversana’s AI agency platform after initially deploying the company’s AI-driven workflows across strategic planning, content development and commercial execution, Eversana explained in an Aug. 25 release. Now, the drugmaker will expand its AI usage to more areas including marketing, medical communications, market access and media operations, as well as explore “additional use cases” with Eversana that could also boost operational performance.
“What makes this partnership unique is that we’re not simply introducing AI tools into existing workflows,” Eversana’s chief innovation officer Faruk Capan said in the release. “Together, we’re implementing an AI-powered operating model designed specifically for life sciences. By combining agentic AI, embedded compliance and human expertise, we can help commercial teams accelerate execution while maintaining the quality and scientific rigor the industry demands.”
Lundbeck, for its part, is looking to build its “bionic capabilities” as a key spoke of how it advances its Focused Innovator R&D strategy, the company’s U.S. EVP and president Tom Gibbs added. By expanding its collaboration with Eversana, Lundbeck can further “scale bionic capabilities responsibly across our commercial organization, improve the speed and quality of execution and ultimately, help us deliver greater value to our customers and patients while maintaining the high standards that define our business,” he said.
Eversana’s AI agency is an end-to-end AI-powered commercialization platform that was built with Google Cloud technology. The agency merges together agentic AI, advanced automation and human expertise to foster a scalable framework for strategy development, content creation and omnichannel engagement, according to the release.
In other words, Eversana is zeroed in on “pharmatizing AI,” CEO Mark Thierer told Fierce in an interview, “with a focus on patients.”
To do so, the company has built the “AI hub of the future,” Thierer said.
As Thierer puts it, the pharmaceutical industry is at a point where companies “have got to find new ways of doing business,” pointing to industry-wide patent cliffs and sweeping financial pressure across the board. AI capabilities, the CEO suggests, could be the answer.
(Eversana )
“What we’re creating is a new way for pharma to do business, spanning marketing, sales, all the way through product launch,” Thierer explained. “Pharmatizing AI is a competitive set of weapons for pharma to win market share, and in the end, get patients on the appropriate therapy.”
Thierer is a veteran healthcare leader who spent years as Eversana’s board chairman before taking the CEO reigns upon Eversana’s merger with his digital health company Waltz Health last year. While the wider Eversana company focuses on integrated commercial services, its specialized AI Agency is the first of its kind. With now a year of operations and expansions under its belt, Thierer figures that while others will “catch up over time,” competitors will have to “run fast, because we’re way ahead at this point,” he said.
The AI wave continues to touch every corner of the industry, with pharmas big and small deploying the technology for intelligent R&D, assistive workflow help, commercial and corporate operations and more. Eversana’s toolkit builds on a longstanding collaboration with Google and is unique in that it is “not comparable to just using AI tools to enhance copywriting or content creations,” Capan said in a release upon launch last year.
Lundbeck’s CEO Charl van Zyl recently told Fierce that the company is capable of “punching above its weight” as a “neuroscience challenger” as the drugmaker continues to build on the momentum of migraine med Vyepti and Otsuka-partnered atypical antipsychotic Rexulti, which drove sales growth of 16% over the first half of the year.
When Lundbeck signed on to use Eversana’s AI Agency platform across its U.S. commercialization operations, the company was equally signing up to become a more competitive force, “all the way from marketing to the distribution of product,” Thierer commented.
“AI is on the desk of every C-suite member of every pharmaceutical company and services company alike,” Thierer said. “Executives are thinking about how to do this, and we’ve emerged as a partner that can help them.”