How BC Catalyst accelerates drug development with real-world and genomic data
Keith Collier explains how BC Catalyst uses AI and multimodal data to speed up insights for research, clinical development and precision medicine.
What life sciences teams need to know about BC Catalyst
Q: How does BC Catalyst help make sense of data?
Keith: BC Catalyst is a prompt-based, AI-native tool that speeds up critical decision-making across life sciences organizations. This means users can simply type in a question and almost immediately receive an answer along with data summaries and visualizations that help identify patient cohorts, uncover potential drug targets, understand genetic variants, and get a clearer view of standards of care, amongst other tasks.
BC Catalyst helps bridge the gap between complex healthcare data and practical, decision-ready intelligence by turning genomic and real-world information into actionable insights across the full drug lifecycle. That gives teams a more complete picture of the precision medicine landscape.
What I find most exciting is that, by bringing together millions of real-world, genomics, and other data points with AI, BC Catalyst allows you to conduct analyses in ways that used to be extremely difficult, time-consuming or expensive.
Q: What does BC Catalyst allow users to do?
Keith: Having a subscription to BC Catalyst gives users the ability to run large-scale data analysis that supports medical innovation. With it, users can:
- Build and query patient cohorts quickly using an advanced cohort composer
- Use a prompt-based interface that gets straight to the answer you are looking for
- Generate downloadable visuals that you can plug into your workflows
- Uncover insights into biomarker–drug–response relationships
- Explore population-level health trends, real-world outcomes, and shifting standards of care
When you use BC Catalyst, the speed and clarity with which it answers complex questions is amazing – a real game changer!
Q: How can BC Catalyst help life sciences companies?
Keith: BC Catalyst helps close the gap between complex healthcare data and the kind of clear decision-ready intelligence teams need. It delivers insights faster and ensures that every analysis follows the same controlled, reproducible process, which helps business teams, as well clinicians and researchers, trust and reuse the results.
By replacing multiple disconnected tools, reducing reliance on internal IT and data engineering and automating manual workflows, the platform delivers significant cost efficiencies, among other advantages:
- Speed up drug development by improving target identification and patient stratification
- Strengthen commercial performance by supporting more precise patient-treatment matching
- Reduce risk by helping identify potential late-stage issues earlier
- Help companies build a competitive edge in the precision medicine space
Q: How does BC Catalyst differ from other advanced analytics products on the market?
Keith: BC Catalyst truly raises the bar for AI- and data-driven healthcare offerings. In my opinion, here’s what sets our platform apart:
- It’s one single place where pharma-grade genomics, multi-modal data, public data, and purpose-built agentic AI all come together
- A prompt-based interface that lets you search for answers and generate visualizations without extra coding
- Support across the full drug lifecycle — from early discovery, to clinical trial acceleration, and through commercial planning and market uptake
- A user experience built specifically for pharma teams, bringing together data, compliance, and usability in one environment
- Access to integrated datasets from our global network of 150+ partners representing more than 130 million patients in over 25 countries, along with curated public sources that are fully incorporated into the platform
Q: What kinds of use cases can BC Catalyst address?
Keith: BC Catalyst can be used for a wide range of use cases across the drug lifecycle, including:
- Drug discovery
- Pre-clinical and clinical research
- Pre-launch and launch planning
- Market access
- Post-launch monitoring
It’s designed to help teams work more easily with complex data at each of these stages, so they get clearer insights faster.
Q: What additional BC Catalyst features are planned for release?
Keith: Our team is focused on steadily expanding BC Catalyst’s capabilities across the drug lifecycle. We’re currently focused on specific areas of oncology, but will add more cancer types and broaden the range and geographic reach of the data available next year. We’re also working on an AI-driven report builder and deeper insights into population health and standard of care. There’s much more to come, so stay tuned!
BC Catalyst brings together multi-modal data— including genomic and real-world data and publicly available datasets — and applies generative AI and other machine learning tools that let users ask questions directly. The result is a platform that helps bridge the gap between complex healthcare data and clear, decision-ready intelligence across the drug development cycle. It enables large-scale data analysis that’s faster, repeatable and accessible for business users as well as researchers.
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