Boehringer & Microsoft: Developing AI Digital Patient Twins

German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim has set its sights on becoming a frontier AI company across human pharmaceuticals and animal health, placing AI and advanced computational techniques at the heart of its future strategy.

Building partnerships with leading AI companies is central to achieving this ambition, bringing together pharmaceutical expertise and advanced technology to explore novel approaches to healthcare and drug development.

Microsoft is among its latest collaborators. Announced during the Microsoft Frontier Tour in Cologne, Germany, the partnership will explore how digital patient twins could transform clinical development, potentially improving trial design and accelerating the generation of evidence for new medicines.

Shashank Desphande, Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors and Head of Human Pharma at Boehringer, sees partnerships between innovative technology and pharmaceutical firms as essential to unlocking AI’s potential in healthcare.

Shashank met Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the event in Germany, and in a LinkedIn post following the meeting, Shashank writes: “One thing is becoming increasingly clear: realising AI’s full potential in healthcare will require more than technology alone. The most impactful innovations rarely emerge in isolation. They happen when different expertise, perspectives and capabilities come together - around a shared ambition.”

He continues: “We have an opportunity to explore new approaches to clinical development, advance the use of AI across everyday work and build the digital foundations that can accelerate innovation across research, operations and in the end patient care.

“Our ambition is not simply to adopt new technology. It is to explore how AI can help accelerate the generation of knowledge, improve decision-making and ultimately translate scientific discoveries into patient impact.”

What are digital patient twins?

Digital patient twins, a central focus of the partnership, are a computational technology that could streamline clinical trial design and accelerate the generation of clinical evidence.

Digital patient twins are AI-enabled computational models of individual patients, using clinical and other relevant data to simulate disease progression and predict how health outcomes could change under different scenarios. 

By creating digital representations of patients, researchers can explore potential disease trajectories and treatment outcomes, supporting more informed decisions in clinical development.

Boehringer and Microsoft will investigate how these models could strengthen clinical research, focusing on disease-progression modelling, predictive outcome modelling and advanced clinical trial simulations.

The collaboration will also explore the potential for digital patient twins to support synthetic and hybrid control arms, which use existing patient data, either alone or combined with data from participants in a conventional control group, to provide a basis for comparison with an investigational treatment.

The research aims to establish the scientific and technical feasibility of these approaches through modelling, prototyping and evidence generation across several disease and therapeutic areas, beginning with lung health. 

If successful, the work could reduce the number of patients needed in control groups, improve clinical trial design and accelerate the generation of evidence needed to evaluate new medicines.

Dr Lykke Hinsch Gylvin, Chief Medical Officer at Boehringer Ingelheim, says the partnership will allow Boehringer to pursue a more patient-centric clinical research approach.

“Boehringer Ingelheim is developing the richest pipeline in its history, and it is our goal to make clinical research more responsive to patients’ unmet needs. Exploring AI-enabled approaches, including the future potential of digital patient twins, could support more patient-centric, informed and efficient clinical research,” says Lykke.

Deepening its Microsoft partnership

The digital patient twin-focused partnership builds on Boehringer’s enterprise-wide deployment of Microsoft Copilot, which is one of the largest in the pharmaceutical industry, according to the company.

In addition, Boehringer and Microsoft are partnering on security and data centre modernisation, alongside projects involving Boehringer’s Animal Health division, company-wide business processes and technology infrastructure.

“Successful AI adoption depends on more than technology alone,” says Harsha Deshmukh, who is a Member of the Board of Managing Directors at Boehringer Ingelheim and responsible for IT and Global Business Services. 

“What matters is enabling our employees to use AI responsibly and unlock its potential through scalable solutions across the complete value chain and all business units.”  

Boehringer Ingelheim - key partners

Eli Lilly 

CEO: David A. Ricks | HQ: Indianapolis, Indiana

Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim have a long-standing pharmaceutical alliance focused on developing and commercialising medicines for type 2 diabetes and related conditions. Their collaboration combines expertise in drug discovery, clinical development and commercialisation, including the diabetes medicine Jardiance (empagliflozin), which is also used to treat heart failure and chronic kidney disease. The alliance demonstrates how pharmaceutical companies can pool expertise to develop treatments for complex, long-term conditions.

Owkin

CEO: Thomas Clozel | HQ: Paris, France

Owkin is an AI biotechnology company developing tools to accelerate drug discovery and development. In September 2026, it signed a licensing agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim, giving the pharmaceutical company access to its K Pro AI Scientist platform and multimodal patient data. The collaboration will support research across oncology and immunology, building on an earlier pilot that explored tumour biology.