DenmarkHealthcare and life sciences2023 – ongoingNovo Nordisk
NovoScribe generative AI for clinical study reports
Novo Nordisk's NovoScribe drafts a clinical study report in about 10 minutes instead of 10 to 12 weeks
Problem
Clinical study reports submitted to regulators can run to 300 pages and were written by teams of statisticians, scientists and medical writers; a writer averaged 2.3 reports a year. Each report took roughly 10 to 12 weeks, and the company links every day saved before a drug reaches market to revenue.
Approach
An 11-person internal team built NovoScribe, which combines a trial's statistical outputs with expert-approved text snippets and a document template through retrieval-augmented generation. It used models including Anthropic's Claude on Amazon Bedrock and stored each snippet with its vector embedding and metadata in MongoDB Atlas so that every sentence can be traced to its source. Experts still review the drafts, and the platform was later extended to device verification protocols and patient materials.
Results
Takeaway
The 10-minute figure covers draft generation; expert quality review still follows. Suppliers quoting Novo Nordisk staff put the previous drafting time at more than 10 weeks or about 12 weeks.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Healthcare and life sciences
- Business function
- IT and R&DInternal work and knowledge management
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- Generative AI
- Adoption
- Built in-house
- Evidence
- Vendor's case study
Sources
Source summaries
Anthropic describes NovoScribe, built with Claude Code, Amazon Bedrock and MongoDB Atlas by an 11-person team. It reports clinical study documentation falling from more than 10 weeks to 10 minutes, a 90% cut in report writing time, a 95% cut in resources for device verification protocols and review cycles roughly halved. It quotes Novo Nordisk's digitalisation strategy director.
MongoDB reports that report creation took about 12 weeks with a multidisciplinary team and that the models now generate a draft in about 10 minutes, with quality assurance taking the remaining time. It explains the retrieval design, the use of Claude 3 and other models, and the traceability of each snippet. It states NovoScribe compiled about 30% of the company's reports, with more than 90% expected by year-end.
Unite.AI reports on a September 2026 drug discovery collaboration between Novo Nordisk and Anthropic and, in passing, the existing NovoScribe deployment. It cites Anthropic's figures: documentation time from more than ten weeks to ten minutes, a 90% cut in writing time and 95% fewer resources for device protocols.
Full details are in the original sources.
