Panel Discussion. Frontiers of Drug Discovery: Will Big Tech Surpass Big Pharma?
Friday 26th September 3-4pm BST; 10-11am ET; 4-5pm CEST; 7-8am PT
Big Tech is discovering drugs, publishing novel methods, and winning Nobel Prizes. Will this field outpace big pharma in the future discovery landscape? Is Pharma’s “innovation theater” just buying time before Big Tech takes over the R&D engine? Do scientists trust Big Tech’s labs less—or secretly more—than Pharma’s? Who owns the future of patients’ health data: Pharma, Big Tech, or neither?
Join our expert panel from top pharma and Big Tech organizations to discuss the opportunities, pitfalls, and possible collaboration opportunities, that Big Tech will bring to the drug discovery sector.
Part of a series of events celebrating 60 years of the Cambridge Structural Database. The world’s largest database of small-molecule organic and metal-organic structures. All are experimentally determined, fully curated, and used by thousands of scientists globally.
The Panellists
Bottom: Dr Steve St-Gallay – Senior Principal Scientist, MSD, Dr Bojana Popovic – CCDC Discovery Science Lead CCDC, Joe Donahue – Life Sciences Entrepreneur, Professor Andreas Bender – Khalifa University, and Dr Anthony Bradley – University of Liverpool
Who Should Attend?
- Leaders in Science, Pharmaceutical, and Big Tech organizations
- Chief Technical Officers
- Chief Data Officers
- Chief Scientific Officers
- Data Quality Managers
- Bioinformatics and Cheminformatics Scientists and Leaders
- AI/ML Scientists
- Data Scientists
- Drug Discovery Data Specialists
The Discussion
To include (if time permits!):
- Market Power & Strategy
- Is Pharma underestimating the scale and ambition of Big Tech in healthcare and life sciences?
- Could Google, Amazon, Apple, or NVIDIA buy their way into drug discovery dominance faster than Pharma can adapt?
- Is Big Tech more motivated by healthcare data than by actually developing therapies?
- The Nobel Prize 2024 went to Google DeepMind; other tech players are also entering pharma (e.g. IBM, Meta). Where will future innovation primarily come from?
- Are we likely to see collaboration or competition in this space?
- Data & AI Advantage
- Who has the real competitive edge in AI for drug discovery: Pharma with decades of experimental data, or Big Tech with the infrastructure and algorithms?
- Is Pharma’s fragmented, siloed data strategy its Achilles’ heel compared to Big Tech’s unified data ecosystems?
- Could “Model-Quality Data” become more valuable than pipelines or patents in the next decade?
- How does the availability of public and proprietary data impact the balance?
- R&D Innovation vs. Execution
- Will Big Tech’s engineering-first mindset outpace Pharma’s biology-first mindset in delivering new therapies?
- Do Big Tech companies have the patience for 10–15 year drug development cycles—or will they reengineer the model entirely?
- Are Pharma’s regulatory and compliance constraints an insurmountable moat, or are they the very thing slowing Pharma enough for Big Tech to leapfrog?
- What factors are key to fostering innovation? Which environment has those?
- Does the origin of innovation matter?
- How do both sides define and measure innovation?
- Regulation & Policy
- Will regulators trust Big Tech more or less than Pharma to handle patient data and clinical research?
- If Big Tech redefines “clinical trial” through digital twins, synthetic data, or virtual cohorts—will regulators follow, or will Pharma fight back?
- Does the current FDA/EMA framework protect Pharma, or leave it vulnerable to disruption?
- Are regulatory requirements likely to help or hinder either side?
- How can governments and regulators prioritize patient outcomes regardless of where discoveries come from?
- Future Scenarios
- Ten years from now, will we talk about drug discovery as a software industry rather than a Pharma industry?
- Could Big Tech ultimately become Pharma’s biggest partner instead of its biggest competitor?
- If you had to bet today, who will bring the first fully AI-discovered blockbuster drug to market—Big Tech or Big Pharma?
Friday 26th September 2025
3pm BST (London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon)
10am ET (Boston, New York, Ontario)
4pm CEST (Berlin, Brussels, Rome, Warsaw)
7am PT (San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver)