AI-Based Pharmaceutical R&D Services Market on a High-Growth Trajectory – report by Towards Healthcare

The AI-based pharmaceutical R&D services market is rapidly expanding, projected to generate several hundred million dollars in revenue by 2034 as AI continues to accelerate drug discovery, lower costs, and enhance prediction accuracy across development stages. This brief report, published by Towards Healthcare a sister firm of Precedence Research highlights the transformative role of AI in reshaping pharmaceutical R&D pipelines.

Ottawa, Nov. 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The AI-Based pharmaceutical R&D services market is experiencing significant expansion, with projections indicating a revenue increase reaching several hundred million dollars by the end of the forecast period, spanning 2025 to 2034. This market is rising because AI dramatically accelerates drug discovery, reduces costs, and improves predictive accuracy across R&D stages, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly adopting AI-based services to streamline their pipelines.

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Key Takeaways:

• North America dominated the AI-based pharmaceutical R&D services market in 2024, with a revenue of approximately 50%.
• Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest-growing region during the forecast period.
• By service/R&D stage, the target identification & validation segment dominated the market in 2024, with a revenue of approximately 30%.
• By service/ R&D stage, the hit generation & virtual screening segment is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.
• By modality/therapeutic focus, the small-molecule discovery segment dominated the market in 2024, with a revenue of approximately 45%.
• By modality/therapeutic focus, the biologics & antibody engineering segment is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.
• By core AI technology, the classical ML/deep learning segment dominated the AI-based pharmaceutical R&D services market in 2024, with a revenue of approximately 40%.
• By core AI technology, the generative AI segment is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.
• By deployment/commercial model, the SaaS/cloud platform access segment dominated the market in 2024, with a revenue of approximately 48% and is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.
• By end-user/buyer type, the pharmaceutical & large biotech companies segment dominated the AI-based pharmaceutical R&D services market in 2024, with a revenue of approximately 58%.
• By end-user/buyer type, the contract research organizations (CROs) & CDMOs segment is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.

Market Overview:

What Is Causing the Growth of the AI-Based Pharmaceutical R&D Services Market?

The AI-Based Pharmaceutical R&D Services Market is undergoing significant growth as drug developers are moving towards data-driven solutions. This market covers services that use AI technologies to facilitate target identification, virtual screening, hit generation, lead optimization, and predictive toxicology. AI solutions using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and generative AI from the pharmaceutical side allow teams to shorten research cycles and increase the odds of success. Broadening partnerships between biotech and large pharma, along with the natural growth to develop their cloud-based development will foster the broad adoption of AI technology for drug development. Growth globally in R&D budget, along with continued pressure to shorten the time to market for new therapeutic agents, is also giving more thrust to this fast-growing market.

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Major Growth Drivers:

What Are the Major Catalysts Driving Growth in This Market?

• Accelerated Drug Discovery and Cost-Reduction: AI-based platforms, including virtual screening and predictive modelling, are reducing R&D costs and timeframes dramatically, allowing companies to screen more than a billion compounds and identify near term candidates.
• Increased Emphasis on Precision Medicine and Biologics: The increased focus on targeted therapies, small molecules, biologics and therapeutics based on antibodies are triggering a wave of pharmaceutical companies utilizing AI to improve lead generation, tailor molecular design, and protein engineering.
• Accessing Cloud and Data Infrastructure: Cloud-based deployment models (SaaS), now available to even the small biotech firm, are enabling AI to scale without the necessity for huge initial capital investment in hardware and IT infrastructure.
• Expanding Dimensions of Strategic Partnerships and Investments: Large pharmaceutical companies, AI companies, and computational biology companies are collaborating increasingly more frequently and efficiently and are backed by gigantic funding rounds that have fueled significantly greater collaboration for innovation and commercialization of AI/ML-based drug discovery.
• Increasing Regulatory and Competitive Pressure: As customer expectations and competition rise, coupled with a more favorable regulatory environment, pharma companies are under significant pressure to accelerate pipelines while ensuring both safe and efficacious therapies to market. AI provides a critical competitive advantage in getting therapies to market faster.

Key Drifts:

What Major Trends Are Emerging in the AI-Based Pharmaceutical R&D Services Market?

• Generative AI for Novel Molecule Design: Generative AI models (for example, diffusion models) are being used more frequently to design compounds de novo with optimized properties that balance potency, synthesizability, and safety.
• Large-Language-Model (LLM) Agents for Drug Discovery Workflows: Systems such as PharmAgents are utilizing LLM-based agents to simulate the entire drug discovery workflow from target identification to pre-clinical development with greater autonomy and scalability than which was previously possible.
• Self-Driving Labs and Automation: Self-driving labs are becoming operational, enabled by AI scheduling systems. These labs incorporate robotics for automated experimentation under AI-based decision systems to speed up the discovery process with fewer human researchers involved.
• Multi-Agent Systems for Hit Identification: Newly developed multi-agent systems are coordinating a variety of AI agents (e.g. generative, screening, scoring) to assist in hit identification and prioritization of compounds with greater scalability and interpretability.

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Significant Challenge:

An essential challenge for AI-powered pharmaceutical R&D services is understanding and navigating complexity related to regulation and data governance. Strict legislation, such as GDPR and HIPAA, restricts data-sharing, while existing AI models are often not transparent or interpretable, raising regulations and companies’ concerns. Without sufficient explainability, AI made decisions will be perceived as more difficult to validate, if AI is predicting toxicity for an example, and it will slowdown adoption or integration into regulated drug development pipelines.

Regional Analysis:

North America, especially the United States, is the leading region for market treating AI-based pharmaceutical R&D services. It is estimated to account for about 50% of the market share in 2024. This lead is attributed to high pharmaceutical R&D spend, a developed biotech ecosystem, and early AI adoption. Additionally, advanced infrastructure, strong venture capital investing, and favorable regulation contribute to North America’s lead. Furthermore, large pharmaceutical companies are making significant investments in AI partnerships and internal platforms to drive faster discovery.

Asia-Pacific is on its way to becoming the fastest growing region in this market, due to rapidly developing and expanding biotech capabilities, low costs, and increasing adoption of AI. According to market reports, the Asia-Pacific region will have the highest CAGR prediction throughout the forecast period. Nations including, but not limited to, China, India, and Singapore, have made large investments in AI and life sciences, and are constructing advanced research and commercialization hubs and strategies and promoting public–private partnerships. With the availability of cloud computing and low-cost access to AI-based platforms, across Asia-Pacific, combined with favorable government policies to spur biotech innovation, is driving adoption. Finally, Asia-Pacific’s large and heterogeneous patient populations create large and novel datasets, and companies are eager to leverage these patient populations for target discovery and clinical trial design and evaluation.

Segmental Insights:

By Service / R&D Stage:

In 2024, the target identification & validation segment was the largest at about 30% of revenues. This segment always reflects the best value for early-stage AI exploration and identification of disease-relevant proteins and biomarkers via AI tools researchers can use to navigate vast omics knowledge, and validate with confidence, biological relevance prior to investing in next stage drug development initiatives.

The hit generation & virtual screening segment is expected to be the fastest growing in terms of CAGR over the next few years. Generative models, docking simulations and predictive scoring functions have all been developed by AI and make the process of generating and evaluating substantial libraries of compounds significantly faster than traditional high-throughput screening, resulting in an even more effective and cost-effective phase of R&D.

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By Modality / Therapeutic focus:

The greatest share of pharma R&D services, at almost 45%, will come from small-molecule discovery – hardly surprising, since small molecules comprise the vast majority of marketed drugs, and AI-led discovery approaches are particularly well-suited to surveying chemical space, predicting drug-likeness, and suggesting synthetically accessible scaffold.

The biologics & antibody engineering area is anticipated to have the highest CAGR during this period. AI methods, and particularly deep learning or generative models can enable sophisticated design of antibodies, protein scaffolds, and biologics for better binding, stability, and manufacturability. This growing area speaks to the increasing significance of biologics in modern therapy.

By Core AI Technology:

In 2024, classical machine learning (ML) and deep learning techniques were leaders in the market with around 40% of revenues. Due to their maturity and demonstrated use, they are used for predicting ADMET profiles, screening compounds, and omics data analysis.

Generative AI is anticipated to observe the fastest CAGR during the forecast period. Generative models such as diffusion, reinforcement learning, and LLM-based models are transforming how novel molecular entities are designed and facilitating new types of molecular structure, optimization, and even synthetic route predictions.

By deployment/commercial model:

The SaaS or cloud platform access segment not only dominated in 2024, but is also expected to grow the fastest. Generally, cloud-based AI platforms are preferable to those with in-house infrastructure because they alleviate infrastructure issues, provide more scalability, and offer value by granting high-level AI-enabled capabilities to “big pharma” and smaller biotechs alike.

By End-User / Buyer Type:

Pharmaceuticals and large biotechs are the most prominent buyers of AI-enabled R&D service in 2024 with approximately 58% of market revenue.  Pharmaceuticals and large biotechs are leveraging AI in R&D to improve internal overall R&D, fortifying pipelines, and being competitive through speeding early-stage drug design and output.

CROs and CDMOs are expected to have the fastest CAGR in the forecast period as outsourcing continues to grow and many CROs are embedding AI capabilities into their platforms, thus providing differentiation in delivering meaningful and high-value R&D services to pharma partners, in exchange for a faster more efficient way to cost effectively run R&D services.

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Recent Developments:

In March 2025, Isomorphic Labs, a drug-discovery spin-out of Google DeepMind, secured a $600 million Series A led by Thrive Capital to expand its AI engine for designing novel therapeutics.

AI-Based Pharmaceutical R&D Services Market Key Players List:

• Exscientia
• Insilico Medicine
• Atomwise
• BenevolentAI
• Recursion Pharmaceuticals
• Schrödinger
• Cyclica
• Valo Health
• Healx
• Cloud Pharmaceuticals
• Numerate
• Berg
• Relay Therapeutics
• Evotec
• Charles River Laboratories
• IQVIA
• Labcorp Drug Development (Covance)
• Certara
• NVIDIA
• Microsoft (Azure)

Segments Covered in the Report

By Service/R&D Stage

• Target Identification & Validation
• Hit Generation & Virtual Screening
• Lead Optimization & SAR Modeling
• De-novo Molecular Design & Generative Chemistry
• Clinical Trial Design, Biomarkers & Patient Stratification
• ADMET/Toxicology Prediction & Synthetic Route Planning

By Modality/Therapeutic Focus

• Small-Molecule Discovery
• Biologics & Antibody Engineering
• Peptides/Oligonucleotides/RNA modalities
• Cell & Gene Therapy support (vector design, manufacturing analytics)
• Others (radiopharma, conjugates)

By Core AI Technology

• Classical ML/Deep Learning
• Graph Neural Networks & Molecular GNNs
• Generative AI
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) & Knowledge Graph
• Explainable AI/Uncertainty Quantification & Hybrid Physics–AI

By Deployment/Commercial Model

• SaaS/Cloud Platform Access
• Collaborative Research Partnerships/Joint Discovery Programs
• Fee-for-Service (project CRO-style engagements)
• On-prem/Licensed Software (large pharma secure installs)

By End User/Buyer Type

• Pharmaceutical & Large Biotech Companies
• Contract Research Organizations (CROs) & CDMOs
• Small/Virtual Biotechs & Startups
• Academic Translational Centers & Research Consortia
• Regulators/Non-profit consortia (data standards, validation pilots)

By Region 

• North America
  • U.S.
  • Canada
• Asia Pacific
  • China
  • Japan
  • India
  • South Korea
  • Thailand
• Europe
  • Germany
  • UK
  • France
  • Italy
  • Spain
  • Sweden
  • Denmark
  • Norway
• Latin America
  • Brazil
  • Mexico
  • Argentina
• Middle East and Africa (MEA)
  • South Africa
  • UAE
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Kuwait

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Towards Healthcare is a leading global provider of technological solutions, clinical research services, and advanced analytics, with a strong emphasis on life science research. Dedicated to advancing innovation in the life sciences sector, we build strategic partnerships that generate actionable insights and transformative breakthroughs. As a global strategy consulting firm, we empower life science leaders to gain a competitive edge, drive research excellence, and accelerate sustainable growth.

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