ACT Brief: AI Literacy and Ecosystem Adoption Requirements, CRO Operating Models Under Agentic AI Pressure, and Platform Collaborations in Vaccine and Antibody Discovery

This is the Applied Clinical Trials Brief—your fast track to the latest insights shaping clinical operations and drug development.

• In part five and final segment of her interview, Amber Hill, PhD, founder and CEO of Research Grid, outlines the three conditions required for AI-driven trial acceleration to work at scale: broad AI literacy, shared boundaries around where it can be applied safely, and incremental adoption of purpose-built tools across the entire ecosystem. Without these preconditions, AI tools remain siloed enablers rather than systemic accelerators.
• In a new contributed article, Joanna Williams, chief operating officer of Mintra Health, examined how agentic AI will put the CRO operating model to the test by removing organizational slack and forcing efficiency and accountability questions the industry can no longer avoid. When processes run efficiently end-to-end, structural failures in sponsorship, oversight, and partnering become immediately visible.
• Eli Lilly partnered with Amplitude Therapeutics to develop RNA vaccines for infectious diseases, with Lilly holding exclusive target-specific commercialization rights while Amplitude leads optimization and preclinical work. Separately, Bristol Myers Squibb entered a collaboration with Chai Discovery to deploy AI molecular folding and design models across BMS's antibody discovery portfolio to accelerate the timeline from target identification to viable candidates.

That's all for today's ACT Brief. Join us tomorrow for more updates shaping clinical operations and drug development. Thanks for listening.