Faro, a San Diego-based digital protocol company, unveiled a multi-year collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb to standardize on Faro’s digital protocol platform as a system of record for structured protocol design across BMS’s drug development organization. The agreement establishes a structured digital foundation intended to support the deployment of clinical protocol AI across design, drafting, validation, and optimization workflows at enterprise scale.
Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed. No upfront payment, milestone structure, or royalty arrangement was referenced in the announcement, consistent with an enterprise software deployment model rather than a traditional biopharma licensing transaction.
Under the terms of the collaboration, BMS will adopt Faro’s platform across its global development teams, covering both early- and late-phase programs. The deployment is not limited to a specific therapeutic area or modality: the platform is designed to operate across BMS’s full development portfolio in a target-agnostic capacity, with the potential to span both early- and late-phase programs.
The core technical problem the agreement addresses is the document-centric nature of conventional clinical trial protocol authorship. Protocols have historically been produced as narrative documents — long-form text that describes study objectives, eligibility criteria, endpoints, and schedules of activities — without machine-readable structure. This format limits the ability to extract, compare, or reuse protocol data systematically and creates downstream inefficiencies when content must be manually re-entered into electronic data capture systems, regulatory submissions, and operational platforms.
Faro’s platform converts narrative protocol elements into structured digital assets aligned to corporate standards and industry frameworks. Within this structured environment, AI agents can execute defined tasks with traceability and human oversight. Per the announcement, those tasks include simulating schedules of activities to assess site and patient burden, quantifying and mitigating protocol complexity prior to study launch, validating internal consistency across study design elements, benchmarking protocol characteristics against industry standards including the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development framework, and drafting protocol sections based on structured inputs.
BMS stated that results from early implementation across several late-stage programs indicate the platform can accelerate timelines, improve quality, and potentially improve study execution and outcomes through streamlined, patient-centric protocols that eliminate unnecessary procedures and provide real-time optimization insights.