London Conference Insights Report – April 2026

13-14 April 2026 | The Royal Society of Medicine, London

The Pistoia Alliance Spring Conference 2026 convened roughly 300 experts and delegates from leading pharmaceutical companies, biotech organisations, and technology providers at London’s Royal Society of Medicine. Over two days of keynotes, content streams, and live audience polling conducted in partnership with Thoughtworks, the conference produced a clear and urgent diagnosis of where the life sciences industry stands on artificial intelligence, data infrastructure, and the transformation of drug development. 

Ten keynote speakers — representing AstraZeneca, Roche, Elsevier, Trinity College Dublin, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and London & Partners — converged independently on three messages that framed the conference and ran through every content stream.  

• AI capability is no longer the constraint. Data infrastructure and organisational readiness are. 

• Agentic AI has crossed from roadmap to production but builds on human oversight.  

• While pharma is making measurable progress, patients are still waiting for the translation. 

The conference’s second day explored four strategic themes. The Semantic Data in Pharma stream examined why ontologies, controlled vocabularies, and FAIR data principles are the guardrails that make AI outputs trustworthy in regulated environments.  

The Accelerating Late-Stage R&D stream made the case that the evidence pharma needs for better late-stage decisions also lives outside clinical trials and that that tapping into those sources at scale requires shared standards and harmonized regulatory frameworks.  

The Practical AI and Machine Learning stream provided concrete evidence that multi-agent orchestration is already delivering compounding productivity returns, while confirming that the human role in these systems is becoming more strategic, not less.  

Finally, the Data Exchange and Regulatory Submissions stream addressed the urgency of a shifting regulatory landscape, where Novel Alternative Models are being elevated by the FDA, GSRS has become the de facto global substance store, and submission standards are being actively redefined. 

A live poll of conference delegates found that while a third of organisations report enterprise-wide AI platforms, 69% lack clear metrics to assess AI’s impact on R&D costs or timelines, and only 4% report tangible R&D benefits to date. The data confirms the conference’s central argument: the capability exists. The data infrastructure and cross-industry coordination to realize its full potential do not yet match it. 

This report includes insights from the keynote talks, four stream reports, poll results, and highlights from the 2026 Data Science Awards, which recognized outstanding contributions from Shruti Kaushal (AbbVie) and the team led by Raul Rodriguez-Esteban (Roche).