BOSTON — Modella AI said it has been acquired by AstraZeneca in a move aimed at expanding the use of artificial intelligence across the pharmaceutical company’s global oncology research and development programs.
The acquisition builds on a multi-year collaboration between the two companies that was announced in July 2025. Under the deal, Modella AI’s generative and agentic artificial intelligence platform will be integrated into AstraZeneca’s oncology R&D organization to help accelerate clinical development, enhance biomarker discovery, and support data-driven decision-making across the oncology pipeline.
Modella AI focuses on applying multimodal artificial intelligence models to life sciences, combining pathology, clinical data, and advanced generative AI to address complex challenges in cancer research.
“Oncology drug development is becoming more complex, more data-rich, and more time-sensitive, and our companies expect AI solutions that are not only powerful but truly deployable in global trials and clinical settings,” said Gabi Raia, chief commercial officer of Modella AI. “By joining AstraZeneca, we can apply our multimodal foundation models and agentic AI platform across a world-class oncology pipeline to accelerate development and help improve outcomes for patients with cancer,” said Jill Stefanelli, Ph.D., co-founder and chief executive officer of Modella AI.
“Modella AI was built at the intersection of pathology, clinical data, and advanced generative AI to tackle some of the hardest problems in oncology,” said Faisal Mahmood, Ph.D., co-founder of Modella AI and a professor at Mass General Brigham. “Integrating our foundation models directly into AstraZeneca’s research ecosystem will help translate methodological advances into real-world impact faster.”
AstraZeneca said the acquisition supports its broader strategy of embedding artificial intelligence across drug discovery and clinical development.
“AstraZeneca is transforming its drug discovery and clinical development through the deployment of innovative and impactful AI solutions,” said Jorge Reis-Filho, chief of AI for science innovation at AstraZeneca. “The acquisition of Modella AI provides state-of-the-art frontier pathology foundation models and AI agents that will continue to enable the development of targeted therapeutics along with diagnostics in our oncology portfolio.”
Under the agreement, Modella AI’s multimodal foundation models and AI agents will be embedded into AstraZeneca’s oncology research environment, enabling new biological and clinical insights and greater automation and scalability across data-intensive workflows. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
