Technology and management consulting firm ZS recently announced that it acquired Trials.ai, a healthcare-focused, pure-play AI and analytics company. ZS calls the acquisition an effort to aid the clinical trials team to help achieve an improved participant experience and deliver therapies to the market in a speedy manner.  

Kim Walpole, co-founder of Trials.ai said, with this acquisition, the duo looks to help bring in more sponsors and help assist critical treatments to market in an accelerated manner. Trials.ai works on using real-time and data-driven intelligence to support study teams to bring forth a speedy and efficient way to make the lives of patients simple, and in the process manage pharmaceutical company’s time and money in an structured manner. 

The start of Trials.ai has been quite personal. Due to the delay in the clinical trial process, Walpole lost one of her close friends. This unfortunate experience accelerated her to the setting up a company in July 2016, bringing speedy clinical trials to needy patents.  

Consisting of a team of professionals from various fields, including AI and life science, the company implants NLP and machine learning to process vast amounts of data in the clinical research fields, and later offer these insights and recommendations to trial sponsors. 

These insights help trial sponsors to optimise their trial protocols and minimise failure. It was estimated that $65 billion is spent by trial sponsors on clinical trials. Out of which, 45 percent of them fail due to improper trial designs. Trials.ai works towards reducing this figure by assisting clinical trials teams in pharmaceuticals, biotech and device companies. 

ZS Chairman, Jaideep Bajaj said that the acquisition of Trials.ai will help their clients by reducing costs and identifying potential risks in their clinical development process. They will focus on end-to-end solutions to trial sponsors to work on their study designs. 

ZS has keenly been investing in the healthcare industry in the last couple of years. In May 2022, ZS acquired Intomics, an analytics company that works with biomedical big data to infer biological insights. In June 2021, the company acquired Medullan, a solution providing digital health firm. All the companies, including Trials.ai were acquired for an undisclosed amount. 

Founded in 1983, ZS Associates is a global marketing and consulting technology company. They apply deep analytics and industry knowledge to serve their clients. In the healthcare sector, ZS has worked with top 50 pharmaceutical companies, and catered to 21 out of 25 top medical technology firms.