Gilead Sciences has expanded its existing collaboration with IT company Cognizant in a bid to more quickly bring drugs to market, with the new five-year service agreement worth approximately $800m.
The partnership will see Cognizant manage Gilead’s global IT infrastructure, platforms, applications and advanced analytics, and take charge of initiatives designed to accelerate the US biopharma’s “digital transformation”.
It is hoped that this will enable Gilead to streamline various parts of its business and accelerate the rate at which it brings medicines for diseases such as HIV, viral hepatitis and cancer, to market.
The agreement builds on the companies’ existing three-year partnership, which has seen Cognizant support Gilead in adopting technologies aimed at driving better business outcomes.
Jarc Berson, senior vice president and chief information officer at Gilead, said: “Over the past three years, Cognizant has demonstrated quality delivery, adaptability and dedication to Gilead’s success.
“Through this collaboration, Cognizant has provided critical expertise to progress our digital transformation journey while enabling stable, secure operations. This has allowed us to advance research and commercialisation of transformative treatments for some of the world’s most challenging diseases.”
Under the latest agreement, Cognizant will continue to help Gilead enhance the experience for its internal and external clients, provide support for enterprise data and analytics platforms across all business functions, and facilitate its shift to cloud-computing environments.
Cognizant also expects to utilise generative artificial intelligence (AI) and AI automation to help improve Gilead’s customer service experience and assist it in driving greater manufacturing efficiencies.
Surya Gummadi, executive vice president and president at Cognizant Americas, said: “We’re excited about this expanded partnership with Gilead, one of the pharmaceutical industry leaders in adapting advanced technologies to better deliver transformative treatments for patients world-wide.
“Working together our teams will be leveraging the latest technologies from automation to cloud computing, and generative AI to help Gilead bring its products to market faster, more efficiently, and with higher customer satisfaction.”
The expansion comes just over a month after Gilead entered partnerships with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the Penta ID network to accelerate the development of dispersible HIV treatment for children.