BC Catalyst is our AI-native analytics platform for life sciences, enabling fast, trustworthy insights from real-world and genomic data to accelerate drug development and improve decision-making. Keith Collier, Chief Product Officer, explains why it’s poised to be a game-changer for the industry.
Q: What challenges does BC Catalyst address?
Keith: Life sciences organizations are dealing with a tough environment. There’s constant pressure to deliver new therapies faster and at lower cost. Yet market entry success rates are typically as low as 10%, and development timelines often span 10-15 years1 and cost an average of more than $2.6 billion per new therapy2. A big part of the problem is the sheer volume of fragmented, incomplete, and siloed data — everything from structured and unstructured genomics and real-world clinical information — that slows down innovation and critical decision-making. Teams often spend weeks or months just gathering and cleaning data before they can even start answering basic questions. It’s been a problem for years.
Q: How does BC Catalyst overcome these challenges?
Keith: BC Catalyst overcomes these challenges by helping companies make better decisions – faster – using an innovative, AI-native platform that’s supported by harmonized multi-modal real-world and genomics data. It uses prompt-based queries that quickly surface insights, from patient trends to how treatments are performing in the market.
This helps life sciences companies design more personalized and precise medicines, and supports them throughout discovery, clinical trial planning, development, and commercial decision-making. It’s a huge step forward for how teams can use data.
Q: What does BC Catalyst mean for the life sciences industry?
Keith: BC Catalyst makes it much easier, and faster, to query and analyze vast volumes of data that’s already been integrated and harmonized. And this is done all within an intuitive, prompt-based interface. It streamlines a lot of the heavy lifting so teams can focus on the science rather than the data wrangling. When researchers can see treatment patterns, patient responses, biomarker signals, and evolving standards of care in minutes, they can make decisions that were simply not feasible before. Customers can use BC Catalyst via prompt-based and exploration, built-in AI agents and preconfigured evidence streams. The platform’s backend algorithms take a clinical or scientific question and instantly assemble a coherent, evidence-backed view of the patient population.
Customers can use BC Catalyst via prompt-based and exploration, built-in AI agents and preconfigured evidence streams.
By combining real-world multimodal data with automated literature synthesis, BC Catalyst compresses weeks of chart reviews, data pulls, and manual research into a single prompt. This gives users immediate visibility into treatment patterns, patient responses, biomarker signals, and standards of care in one integrated view. That means discovering new therapeutic opportunities earlier, designing smarter trials, identifying the right patients with far greater precision, and targeting existing therapies to the populations most likely to benefit.
BC Catalyst removes the friction that has slowed evidence generation for years. That’s a huge impact.
Q: How does BC Catalyst reflect real-world needs?
Keith: BC Catalyst was built with direct input from clinicians, researchers and other key players across the life sciences ecosystem, so it’s stays aligned with what people need in their day-to-day projects and tasks. Clinicians help to define the questions that matter most and can see how treatments affect outcomes across different patient groups. Researchers can look at the same data to generate insights that support clinical trials and studies.
With agentic AI-driven queries and clear visualizations, BC Catalyst helps translate complex data into insights that are easier to understand, making it quicker to reach evidence-based decisions.
Q: Who can benefit from using BC Catalyst?
Keith: BC Catalyst is useful for a wide range of life sciences organizations— from startups and biotechs to mid-sized and global pharma. It’s meant for R&D, medical affairs, clinical and commercial teams that need quick, reliable insights. Who doesn’t want to move faster?
The platform cuts down the time and effort required to access and analyze real-world and genomic data, along with public datasets. Tasks that used to take weeks of gathering, cleaning and building custom analyses can now be done in seconds. And since BC Catalyst is prompt-based, users don’t need to be data scientists or technical experts. They can work with trusted data through a simple interface and easily generate actionable insights.
Q: How is data harmonized for use with BC Catalyst?
Keith: The data that BC Catalyst applies is powered by BC Unify, our AI-driven data mastering platform. It anonymizes, enriches, harmonizes and integrates data so it’s ready for predictive analytics and other activities. That harmonized data is then made available and visualized through BC Catalyst.
Q: What about patient privacy and related data governance standards?
Keith: At BC Platforms, we’ve spent more than 25 years working with trusted research environments and handling sensitive healthcare data, so privacy is something we understand very well – and take very seriously. Our infrastructure and processes meet stringent standards for data governance, privacy and security. Customers can have peace of mind that they’re working in an environment that meets data compliance requirements.
Q: What is agentic AI?
Keith: Agentic AI goes beyond answering questions. It autonomously plans, executes, and adapts to accomplish research goals. Unlike traditional AI that responds to individual prompts, agentic AI breaks down objectives into steps, uses multiple tools and data sources, and makes intelligent decisions to deliver comprehensive insights with minimal human intervention. Examples of usage include:
Multi-Step hypothesis testing: BC Catalyst autonomously designs and executes research workflows. Ask a single question, and the system identifies relevant patient cohorts, and cross-references findings with published literature, and generates reports with visualizations—all without requiring step-by-step guidance from you.
Intelligent data triangulation: BC Catalyst automatically validates findings by pulling evidence from multiple sources simultaneously. The system combines harmonized biomarker data, clinical outcomes, real-world evidence, and external databases to confirm patterns, identify contradictions, and surface supporting evidence—giving you confidence in every insight.
Ultimately, BC Catalyst is about speeding up and improving the way the life sciences can develop breakthrough new therapies and get them to market more efficiently—providing fast, reliable insights for R&D, medical affairs, clinical and commercial teams, and so much more.
