ZS Announces Exclusive Partnership with Intelligencia to Reduce Risk in Clinical Development and Guide Portfolio Investments

EVANSTON, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, global professional services firm ZS announced an exclusive partnership with and supporting investment in Intelligencia, an artificial intelligence company pioneering the use of machine learning to assess, quantify and reduce the risk of clinical development and guide pipeline decision-making.

Intelligencia uses an expertly curated deep historical database of clinical trial activity to accurately assess the likelihood of clinical and regulatory successes and bridge the gap between innovation and risk reduction, with the goal of bringing novel therapies to the patients who need them.

This partnership will accelerate the ongoing work ZS does in pipeline, portfolio strategy and transaction advisory services with life sciences companies. Intelligencia’s platform strengthens ZS’s ability to deeply research diseases and pipeline products on behalf of their clients and enables the use of proprietary best-in-class probability of technical and regulatory success predictions to make ZS recommendations more robust.

“This strategic partnership provides extensive benefits to our clients and partners,” said Judith Kulich, a ZS principal and the leader of the firm’s pipeline and launch strategy practice. “Through a robust understanding of the drivers behind clinical and regulatory success, as well as predictive modeling of molecules and programs most likely to be successful, we will guide our clients to invest in those areas most likely to realize value for patients and bring about tangible impact. Ultimately, this will reduce risk in drug development and improve the productivity of research and development.”

The Intelligencia platform represents a major advancement in the sophistication and breadth of historical trial data used by biopharmaceutical companies to assess clinical or regulatory success. While most companies use a combination of external benchmarks, in-house algorithms leveraging the company’s own development history or the personal experience of clinical staff, Intelligencia’s platform can objectively forecast clinical and regulatory success using the industry’s development history.

The platform’s full data set has been methodically scrubbed for accuracy, reliability and standardization. Additionally, the machine learning algorithms have been systematically validated as fit for use through historical testing.

“We are committed to build strategic partnerships that help us accelerate innovation for our clients,” said Swati Gokhale, a principal at ZS and the strategic partnerships leader. “Intelligencia’s richness, history and comprehensiveness of data goes far beyond existing offerings on the market and will immediately impact and improve pipeline development decisions ultimately creating value for the industry.”

“Intelligencia has been pioneering the application of data science solutions towards assessing and mitigating risks in drug development. This is solidly founded on expertly curated data and proprietary ontologies that have enabled us to generate one of the world's richest knowledge graphs in our space. We are now truly excited to be partnering with ZS. With my co-founder, Vangelis Vergetis, we have come to appreciate that advancements in drug development are best served through joint efforts and collaboration. In our partnership with ZS, we share a common vision—enabling the life science industry through better data and data science solutions. Equally important is that our organizations also share certain fundamental values,” said Dimitrios Skaltsas, co-founder of Intelligencia.

ZS will immediately begin employing the Intelligencia platform to accelerate and improve its strategic advisory work with clients. The investment ZS made in Intelligencia was part of a $12 million fundraising round led by MTIP that was announced last week.

For more information about how ZS leverages deep industry expertise, leading-edge analytics, technology and strategy to create solutions for its biopharmaceutical clients, they can be contacted our team here: https://www.zs.com/contact-us

About ZS

ZS is a professional services firm that works side by side with companies to help develop and deliver products that drive customer value and company results. We leverage our deep industry expertise, leading-edge analytics, technology and strategy to create solutions that work in the real world. With more than 37 years of experience and 10,000-plus ZSers in 28 offices worldwide, we’re passionately committed to helping companies and their customers thrive. To learn more, visit www.zs.com or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Intelligencia

Intelligencia is an AI-driven technology company that focuses on minimizing the risk of drug development and enabling external innovation. It transforms how R&D and Business Development executives think about and assess the risk of clinical development programs and enables them to make more informed and data-driven decisions as they evaluate their own pipelines and/or external opportunities. Visit www.intelligencia.ai to learn more.