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Thermo Fisher and OpenAI collaborate to accelerate drug development through AI integration


By Terri Somers
Senior Manager, Global PR and StoryLab


WALTHAM, Mass. (Oct. 16, 2025) Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., the world leader in serving science, announced a landmark collaboration with OpenAI today to embed advanced artificial intelligence across its clinical trials business — aiming to accelerate drug development, simplify the research processes, and get medicines to patients faster and more cost-effectively.

The collaboration is part of Thermo Fisher’s company-wide AI adoption to further enhance its proven growth strategy, applying cutting-edge tools to speed scientific innovation, enhance productivity, and reduce complexity in numerous processes.

“AI is shaping the future of science. And when combined with our Mission to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer, it is a powerful catalyst to accelerate scientific advancement,” said Marc Casper, Thermo Fisher’s Chairman, President and CEO.  “With OpenAI, we’re further embedding AI across our operations, products and services. Together, we’re building an ecosystem that accelerates scientific breakthroughs and delivers impact for patients and society.”

Thermo Fisher and OpenAI collaboration aims to accelerate clinical trials and enable the delivery of new medicines to patients sooner.

Open AI’s advanced capabilities will initially be deployed to one of the focus areas with the highest impact - Thermo Fisher’s clinical research business, PPD – to significantly improve the cycle time of clinical trials and accelerate the time to bring new medicines to market.

 

The collaboration will also:

  • Combine the expertise and capabilities from both organizations to be applied across Thermo Fisher to more quickly help identify therapies that are unlikely to succeed, so that customers can redirect investment and resources toward more promising opportunities.

  • Integrate AI into Thermo Fisher’s Accelerator™ Drug Development solution, spanning early development, Phase I–III clinical research, clinical manufacturing and supply and commercialization, to deliver greater speed, simplicity and scalability for customers.

  • Launch frontier AI to Thermo Fisher colleagues, with ChaptGPT Enterprise, making it easier to build confidence and fluency with AI.

“Thermo Fisher plays a massive role in advancing science, and together we have an opportunity to accelerate how medicine can reach more people,” said Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer at OpenAI. “With OpenAI directly powering Thermo Fisher workflows, frontier AI can help cut through complexity, speed up breakthroughs, and bring real impact to patients' lives."