Baidu Lingyi Zhihui and Roche Announce Strategic Partnership: Empowering Pharma Digital Transformation with AI
Driven by policy initiatives, market evolution, and the normalization of pandemic control measures, the healthcare industry has entered an era of digital intelligence. Medical scenarios such as new drug development, intelligent screening, clinical decision support, and real-world studies are increasingly integrating with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Consequently, digital-intelligent R&D, digital-intelligent clinical trials, and digital-intelligent marketing have become focal points for pharmaceutical companies’ digital transformation.
On August 11, the Roche Pan-Tumor Precision Diagnosis and Treatment Innovation Ecosystem Forum was held in Shanghai. Baidu Lingyi Zhihui and Roche Pharmaceuticals entered into a strategic partnership, whereby both parties will fully integrate their respective strengths. With AI empowerment as the focal point of collaboration, they will launch digital-intelligent R&D cooperation in areas such as AI-driven precision medicine and AI-enabled drug discovery, delve into full-pathway patient management service scenarios, and explore new directions for the digital-intelligent transformation of pharmaceutical companies.
As one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, Roche Pharmaceuticals boasts a portfolio of best-in-class, differentiated medicines in the fields of oncology, immunology, infectious diseases, ophthalmology, and central nervous system disorders. Leveraging the unique synergies between its pharmaceuticals and diagnostics divisions, Roche holds a global leadership position in in vitro diagnostics and tissue-based cancer diagnostics. The strategic partnership between Baidu Lingyi Zhihui and Roche Pharmaceuticals will drive the implementation of AI technologies across the entire lifecycle—from drug research and clinical trials to patient engagement, patient perception, and physician-patient relationship management.
Ms. Bian Xin, President of Roche China, stated that in the field of precision oncology diagnosis and treatment, Roche will join hands with multiple leading ecosystem partners to launch deep strategic collaborations, thereby actively exploring digital-driven potential innovation and providing personalized medical solutions for patients. Amidst the global trend of digital healthcare, Roche has always adhered to the philosophy of “acting in the best interests of patients first.” Looking forward, Roche expects to collaborate with peers in the ecosystem to co-create value within the vast space of pan-cancer precision diagnosis and treatment and digital healthcare innovation, ushering in a new chapter in personalized cancer therapy.
He Mingke, Senior Vice President of Baidu Group, stated that the integration of Baidu AI with healthcare has created a “comprehensive network.” On the online front, Baidu has built a health industry ecosystem spanning from content to services, covering the entire process from popularizing medical knowledge to online consultations. On the offline front, through Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) in hospitals and the Xiaodu smart hardware ecosystem, Baidu AI facilitates better interaction between patients and physicians and ensures effective service delivery. Meanwhile, AI can assist pharmaceutical companies in drug research and development as well as evaluation, thereby enhancing the efficiency and quality of drug development and market launch.
As a leader in AI-driven healthcare, Baidu Lingyi Zhihui integrates medical scenarios to provide end-to-end AI healthcare solutions, including clinical trials, disease screening, clinical diagnosis and treatment decision support, smart medical records, and chronic disease management. Through its collaboration with Roche Pharmaceuticals, Baidu will leverage its intelligent voice interaction system to offer patients intelligent Q&A services for disease education and deliver proactive, personalized reminders based on treatment plans, setting a benchmark for intelligent patient management. Meanwhile, Baidu Health, as a leading internet platform for health education and services, utilizes AI to build a doctor-patient matching engine, enhancing the efficiency and experience of patients’ medical decision-making. Baidu aims to empower the entire industry chain with technology, effectively serving patients, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies through AI, thereby fulfilling the responsibilities and mission of a technology company.
Centered on the deep integration of AI and pharmaceuticals, Lingyi Zhihui leverages digital intelligence technologies to break down barriers across various stages of the traditional pharmaceutical value chain, including new drug R&D and pharmaceutical marketing. This empowers pharmaceutical companies to transform their conventional R&D and marketing models, achieve efficient multi-channel synergy, optimize patient diagnosis and treatment experiences, further expand drug accessibility, and benefit a broader population of patients.
It is reported that Baidu Lingyi Zhihui has empowered the pharmaceutical industry with technology across the entire drug lifecycle—from R&D, clinical trials, and product promotion to patient education—and throughout the full patient journey of screening, diagnosis, treatment, and management. In drug R&D, leveraging Baidu’s deep learning framework and vast bioinformatics data, Baidu Lingyi Zhihui has built a data- and knowledge-driven biocomputing platform to help pharmaceutical companies accelerate drug development and reduce preclinical R&D costs. For new drug clinical trials, it has established a medical big data platform to comprehensively accelerate all aspects of the clinical trial process, including subject recruitment, remote monitoring, and real-world studies (RWS). Meanwhile, through products and services such as pharmaceutical screening hardware, AI-powered follow-up tools, and Xiaodu smart speakers, Baidu Lingyi Zhihui provides patients with digital and intelligent services covering the entire care cycle, from disease awareness to patient management.
Currently, the broader health industry is undergoing a profound ecological transformation. In the post-pandemic era, traditional healthcare-seeking behaviors have been disrupted, with users’ health consumption habits shifting online. As China’s largest medical information search portal, Baidu Health handles over 200 million health-related search queries daily and serves more than 100 million users on average each day. Meanwhile, user demands have expanded beyond diagnosis and treatment to include pre-diagnosis and health maintenance, continuously broadening the scope of internet-based health needs.
In response to the transformative trends spanning from user needs to upstream industries, Baidu has built a comprehensive service ecosystem around the broader health industry. This includes Bioto Life Sciences, which focuses on AI-driven drug discovery; Baidu Health, which provides internet-based healthcare services; and Lingyi Zhihui, which is dedicated to smart healthcare solutions. These initiatives effectively empower and connect government agencies, hospitals, patients, R&D institutions, and insurance providers, thereby maximizing the operational capabilities of medical institutions.
In the realm of smart healthcare services, Baidu Lingyi Zhihui leverages the core technologies and AI capabilities of Baidu Brain to build industry-leading medical AI, medical knowledge, and medical data middle platforms. Building on this foundation, it provides comprehensive AI healthcare solutions across all scenarios, empowering hospitals, strengthening primary care, and benefiting patients. For hospitals, Lingyi Zhihui integrates AI capabilities into business workflows, with smart diagnosis and treatment at its core, connecting data and operational chains to construct a tripartite smart hospital system encompassing “diagnosis and treatment, services, and management,” thereby helping hospitals improve quality and efficiency. For primary healthcare, Lingyi Zhihui offers an intelligent clinical decision support system to grassroots physicians, enhancing the service capacity of primary healthcare institutions, promoting standardized and regulated diagnosis and treatment, and improving the diagnostic and therapeutic efficiency of primary care doctors.
Currently, Lingyi Zhihui has served over 600 tiered medical institutions and more than 3,000 primary healthcare facilities across China, supporting tens of thousands of physicians and benefiting over ten million patients. Lingyi Zhihui aims to continuously deliver AI-driven healthcare capabilities to society, enhancing the efficiency and quality of the medical industry, and leveraging AI to make high-quality medical resources universally accessible.