At Fierce’s DPHARM conference in Boston, Hippocratic AI’s general manager for life sciences, Sohit Gatiganti, sat down with AstraZeneca’s David Carruthers to talk about agentic-first clinical trials. Carruthers described how AZ built leadership buy-in with a simple deployment: AI that books Ubers for patients after trials, which removes a real barrier to participation. Patient screening came next, since a sponsor can’t recruit anyone until they’ve been screened. The goal there was a smooth, patient-centered first interaction. Carruthers’s advice was to stay modest about expectations. AZ assumes zero benefit in its trials, which keeps the bar realistic even though he sees a huge upside.
Gatiganti laid out a bold vision for Hippocratic: open a trial, plug into a sponsor’s providers and sites, surface eligible patients, call them, schedule first visits as soon as the trial opens, and complete enrollment in two months. Once enrollment is solved, he said, the rest of the medical value chain follows, and Hippocratic wants to be able to run a trial end to end in two years. That ambition comes with momentum. Hippocratic raised a $141 million Series B at a $1.4 billion valuation last year and this year launched a platform of conversational agents for patient interaction.