Certara, Inc. has announced a collaboration with NVIDIA aimed at expanding the use of agentic artificial intelligence across drug discovery and development workflows.
The partnership will integrate NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit into Certara’s open, integrated AI platform, which combines the company’s scientific software, proprietary datasets, biosimulation models and regulatory expertise. Certara said the collaboration is intended to help life sciences organizations generate faster and more reproducible scientific insights while maintaining expert human oversight.
NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit is designed to enable AI agents to operate as autonomous life sciences research assistants by connecting them to NVIDIA’s broader life sciences technology stack. Within Certara’s platform, the toolkit will serve as one of several available agentic AI frameworks for customers.
The platform is expected to support specialized AI agents that can work across multiple stages of medicine development. These agents may be used to optimize dosing strategies through systems pharmacology models, analyze clinical datasets, simulate patient populations and clinical trial scenarios, assess absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity properties, and support the preparation of evidence packages for regulatory submissions.
Certara said the approach is designed to augment rather than replace scientific teams. Its model-informed drug development capabilities are widely used to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies make decisions about drug dosing, clinical trial design and regulatory strategy. By combining AI agents with established biosimulation models and scientific expertise, the company aims to give researchers more efficient access to integrated evidence while preserving scientific review and accountability.
Jon Resnick, chief executive officer of Certara, said the collaboration will help bring advanced AI capabilities to life sciences in a way that maintains scientific rigor.
“Agentic AI combined with Certara’s world-class scientists, validated models, and data keeps the scientist in the loop while delivering the speed, scale, and reproducibility our clients need to generate integrated evidence for regulators,” Resnick said.
The announcement reflects growing interest in agentic AI systems within the pharmaceutical industry. Unlike conventional AI tools that typically perform individual tasks, agentic systems can be designed to plan, reason across connected datasets and models, and execute multi-step scientific workflows. In drug development, these capabilities could help reduce the time required to assess early discovery hypotheses, identify promising candidates and prepare evidence for clinical and regulatory decision-making.
Chris Bouton, Certara’s chief technology officer and chief AI officer, said computational models are increasingly expected to play a central role in simulating human biology and improving the development of new medicines.
Certara’s integration of NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit is expected to strengthen its broader vision of using AI, biosimulation and scientific expertise to support more efficient and evidence-driven drug development.