Chris Boshoff, Chief Scientific Officer and President of Research and Development at Pfizer, shared on LinkedIn:
“From the Manhattan Project to the moon landing to the mRNA revolution, science has repeatedly delivered breakthroughs that changed humanity.
We’re at another one of those moments. And this time, the force multiplier is AI.
What’s happening now isn’t incremental. The convergence of foundation models, autonomous agents, and decades of accumulated data from biological research is creating something genuinely new – a scientific infrastructure that learns continuously, reasons across domains simultaneously, and gets better with every experiment, every patient, every decision.
At Pfizer, we’re building toward exactly this.
Our ambition is to become an AI-native R&D organization – not one that uses AI tools, but a scientific command center built on living data, continuously updating models, and agentic systems that interpret, propose, and critique across the entire drug development pipeline.
Every molecule designed, every trial run, every regulatory and medical interaction becomes structured intelligence that informs the next decision. Discovery, translational biology, clinical development, and medical evidence stop being sequential handoffs and become continuous, connected decision loops.
The center of gravity of human work shifts upward: toward scientific imagination, strategic judgment, and the relationships that matter most.
This isn’t about replacing scientists. It’s about building an organization that learns at the rate of evidence – not the rate of committee cycles – so our teams can pursue more targets with greater confidence, design better molecules with fewer failures, and run smarter trials that bring more breakthroughs to more people, faster than ever before.
Pfizer was founded in Brooklyn more than 175 years ago. The next chapter – AI-accelerated discovery in service of human health – may be the most consequential one yet.”