How BC Unify works: A conversation on the AI-native platform behind our solutions

Executive summary

• BC Unify is the AI-native, end-to-end platform that integrates and transforms fragmented multimodal real-world data and public clinical knowledge into high-quality, research-ready datasets. It powers BC Platforms’ products and enables scalable, automated, repeatable data mastering.  
• In this conversation, Chief Product Officer Keith Collier and Chief Architect Niko Hurskainen discuss why we developed BC Unify, how it works, and what makes it unique. 

How do you describe BC Unify? 

Niko: BC Unify is a comprehensive end-to-end solution for real-world data. It brings together fragmented data, patient-level clinical information, and public data sources into one harmonized master dataset that can be used for analysis. 

Keith: I would add that BC Unify powers our products, including BC Mosaic, our TRE, and BC Catalyst, our AI-powered precision medicine platform. It’s the internal platform that takes raw multimodal data and makes it research-ready. 

Why did we develop BC Unify? 

Keith: There were two main reasons. First, our services teams used to manually bring data together for projects. That required time, people, and custom work every time. Automating and scaling that process became essential. Second, we wanted to dramatically increase the amount of data flowing into BC Catalyst. You cannot do that manually. You need automation, agentic AI, and industrial-grade pipelines. BC Unify gives us that. 

Niko: And we needed to solve the core issue in real-world data, which is fragmentation and complexity, with different data models, languages, and different structures. BC Unify harmonizes all of that into something consistent, usable, and trustworthy. 

How does BC Unify support BC Platforms mission? 

Niko: Our mission is to transform drug development and personalized care through faster, better-informed decisions. This requires an understanding of patients, treatment pathways, biomarkers, and disease progression. BC Unify creates the harmonized data foundation that allows that understanding. 

Keith: Exactly. BC Unify is foundational technology for us. Any company working with massive multimodal real-world data needs a system like this to make data usable, repeatable, and scalable.  

You say that BC Unify acts like a data refinery; what do you mean? 

Keith: We take raw materials — fragmented data —and refine them into high-quality, structured data that powers BC Catalyst and other BC Platforms’ solutions. 

Niko: Think of how a refinery converts raw oil into petrol. BC Unify converts raw real-world data into research-ready datasets that help improve treatments and develop new therapies. And at the same time, BC Unify drives everything we build. So yes, it is a refinery, but also an engine that powers our products.  

What does BC Unify do that other data mastering platforms don’t? 

Niko: BC Unify is purpose-built for real-world data, end to end. The workflows, the user experience, and the AI models are all designed for harmonizing clinical data and publicly-available data. Other platforms focus only on technical infrastructure, but BC Unify solves the harmonization problem. 

Keith: Another important differentiator is that it’s AI-native. We built BC Unify in 2025 with AI at the foundation, not layered on afterwards. That lets us extract meaning from data at scale, at a level that systems built years ago cannot match. 

What problems does BC Unify solve? 

Keith: The first one is repeatability. With BC Unify, we can build automated data pipelines with consistent quality control that we can reproduce for every data partner. The second is scalability. Once data is processed in BC Unify, we can reuse it for any custom projects. 

Niko: BC Unify makes it possible to understand global treatment patterns, standards of care, and patient journeys at a scale that was not accessible before. And it simplifies participation in research for healthcare organizations by making their data available in standard formats like OMOP, FHIR, or SDTM. 

How does BC Unify use AI in practice? 

Niko: BC Unify uses AI across the entire data lifecycle — from ingestion and harmonization to enrichment, validation, and delivery. It extracts knowledge from unstructured clinical notes, processes public data sources, and builds knowledge bases that power the rest of the BC Platforms portfolio. 

Keith: And because BC Unify is AI-first, we can move faster and extract deeper meaning than systems that rely on manual editorial curation. 

Was there a moment you felt BC Unify would exceed expectations? 

Keith: Yes. I’m a product guy. I’m visual, so I got really excited when I saw the first screens showing global data flowing into BC Unify, harmonizing in real time, with dashboards our data operations team could use to validate everything. That was the moment it clicked for me. 

Niko: For me, it was the first time we saw the end-to-end user experience. That was when we knew we were solving the challenge in the right way. 

What future developments for BC Unify are you most excited about? 

Keith: I’m excited about scaling how much data we can bring into BC Unify. As we connect more data partners, we’re not only able to ingest their datasets at a much larger scale; we’re also giving them clearer visibility into how their data is harmonized, validated, and ultimately used. That creates a real feedback loop. And it’s not just about powering our solutions. The quality and depth of this combined data accelerate precision medicine by giving researchers and clinicians a more complete understanding of diseases and treatment patterns. 

Niko: We want to increase the number of datasets flowing through BC Unify, simplify global access, and integrate new AI capabilities as language models evolve.