US-based tech firm Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) announced on Tuesday an agreement with UK-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca (LON: AZN) to explore how AI and real-world data can help clinicians identify eligible patients for clinical trials, accelerate evidence generation, and bring relevant research insights into everyday care.

The collaboration is intended to combine AstraZeneca's scientific and therapeutic expertise with Oracle's health data, cloud, AI, analytics, and clinical workflow capabilities.

Through a non-binding agreement, the companies say that they plan to explore selected use cases that could improve clinical-trial efficiency and success by leveraging modern applications and AI to help care teams identify eligible patients earlier and easier, resulting in greater access to clinical trials for patients in need and helping to overcome one of the largest obstacles in clinical trials - patient recruitment.

Initial disease areas to be explored could include oncology; cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases; respiratory and immunology; and rare diseases.

AstraZeneca and Oracle add that they intend to explore a continuous learning model in which insights from clinical research and routine care help inform future study design, safety monitoring, and patient care. The companies also plan to establish shared governance, reusable technical components, and agreed outcome measures to assess results and determine whether successful approaches could extend across disease areas and geographies.