LG CNS expands AI transformation push into pharma, biotech

Kim Tae-hoon, fourth from right, senior vice president of LG CNS’ AI cloud business, and Jang Min-yong, third from right, LG CNS' head of chemical and battery division, poses with officials from Chong Kun Dang at the LG CNS headquarters in Seoul, Monday. / Courtesy of LG CNS

LG CNS, an IT services and digital transformation arm of LG Group, is expanding its artificial intelligence (AI) business into the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector, securing a large-scale contract for a government-led drug R&D initiative and deploying an automated quality assessment system for pharmaceutical products.

The company announced Wednesday that it is participating in the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s AI-driven drug R&D program, which will invest about 37.1 billion won ($25.2 million) over four years and three months.

In this project, LG CNS will lead in developing an AI-powered platform to design and support clinical trials for new drug research. It will also build an integrated management framework that will utilize agentic AI to orchestrate various AI models that other participating institutions developed, creating synergies across the ecosystem.

The company will apply a decentralized machine learning approach known as federated learning to the platform, enabling hospitals and clinical research centers to jointly train AI models without sharing sensitive data externally. This is intended to protect data privacy while accelerating development timelines by safely bridging preclinical and clinical stages.

“LG CNS’ AI transformation capabilities in pharma and biotech are being recognized by both government and industry partners, leading to real business outcomes,” Kim Tae-hoon, senior vice president of LG CNS’ AI cloud business, said. “By leading in agentic AI, we aim to strengthen the competitiveness of Korea’s pharmaceutical and biotech industry, and become a true game changer delivering differentiated customer value.”

The company also recently automated the pharmaceutical company Chong Kun Dang’s annual product quality review (APQR) process using its agentic AI platform, AgenticWorks, dramatically speeding up reports and quality management operations.

The solution deploys around 30 AI agents that autonomously collaborate across data collection, analysis, validation and report generation. With just a few clicks, users can aggregate and analyze data directly from core systems such as the quality management system and the laboratory information management system to automatically produce complete reports.

The company explained the new agentic AI–based APQR service has reduced the time spent to generate reports by more than 90 percent, allowing the pharmaceutical company to use the saved time toward final validation and quality enhancement.