Pharma, life sciences GCCs cut drug timelines by 1–2 years: Report
In clinical trials, AI-driven patient recruitment, trial design, and real-time analytics are shortening development cycles
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Hyderabad: India’s Pharma and Life Sciences Global Capability Centres (GCCs) are delivering measurable gains across the drug development value chain, accelerating time to market and reductions in end to end R&D costs, according to the report “Making it matter: How GCCs transform capability into end patient impact,” developed in collaboration with KPMG in India and UnearthIQ.
End-to-end adoption of AI, automation, and advanced analytics across the value chain is compressing drug development timelines from 10–15 years to 9–13 years. The efficiency gains free R&D teams from routine tasks, redirecting talent toward bold, high-impact innovation. As a result, R&D-to-launch costs have declined from 20–30 per cent to 15–25 per cent.
Across R&D and preclinical development, GCCs are accelerating target identification, protein modelling, and compound screening, cutting early-stage timelines by 5–6 years. In clinical trials, AI-driven patient recruitment, trial design, and real-time analytics are shortening development cycles by 4–6 years and improving success rates.
Shalini Pillay. Partner and India Leader – Global Capability Centres, KPMG in India, said, “The next phase of evolution of the GCC model, as it moves up the maturity curve, will be driven by the business context and core sector/domain knowledge. Leveraging emerging technologies & GenAI to impact the core sectoral challenges is what will drive significant outcomes and truly unlock the RoI. The GCCs, technology and innovation hubs focused on streamlining the underlying data structures, integrating technology across the core value chain, investing in techno-functional capabilities, and leveraging the wider ecosystem to fuel research and innovation, will pave the way forward for global Healthcare and Life Sciences players.”
India today hosts 150 Healthcare and Life Sciences GCCs, spanning R&D centres, Global Business Services, Global Shared Services, and Centres of Excellence, and employing over 300,0001 professionals. The landscape is dominated by GCCs in pharma (30–35 per cent), life sciences (20–25 per cent), and medical devices (20–25 per cent), with a growing presence across healthcare and health-tech (20 per cent), providers (10 per cent), and payers (5 per cent).
Healthcare and MedTech GCCs in India are also undergoing a sharp shift, from traditional engineering support to innovation-led product development hubs. By embedding AI platforms, digital engineering, and regulatory automation across R&D, design, manufacturing, and compliance, these centres are compressing medical device development cycles from 5–8 years to 3–5 years while improving software-led margin leverage from 10–15 per cent to 18–25 per cent.
