Novellia Wins 2026 Fierce Outsourcing Award for Innovation in Drug Development

Novellia has been named the winner of the 2026 Fierce Outsourcing Award for Innovation in Drug Development. This award recognizes outsourcing partners that have advanced drug development through innovative methodologies, technologies, or scientific approaches that improve efficiency, speed, or effectiveness across the pipeline. Novellia was selected for building the first real-world data platform constructed entirely on patient authorization, delivering longitudinal, AI-structured health records that pharmaceutical and biotech companies cannot access through any other source. Novellia adds this award alongside recognition as a MedTech Breakthrough Award winner and a place on Digital Health New York's list of 10 startups to watch.

Selected by senior leaders from Gilead, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Moderna, Vertex, and the NIH, Novellia takes the top honor in a category that included Altasciences, Inductive Bio, Luminary Therapeutics, the Open Source Imaging Consortium, and Syngene International.

About the Fierce Outsourcing Awards

Fierce covers the life sciences industry through Fierce Pharma, Fierce Biotech, and Fierce Healthcare, reaching the executives, researchers, and operators making decisions across the drug development pipeline.

The Fierce Outsourcing Awards (formerly the Fierce CRO Awards) recognize the companies and teams that make modern drug development possible. From discovery through commercialization, outsourcing partners play a critical role in helping pharma and biotech companies move faster, manage risk, and bring innovative therapies to patients. The program honors organizations delivering scientific rigor, operational excellence, and trusted partnership at every stage of the pipeline. Eligible applicants include CROs, CDMOs, clinical trial technology providers, data and analytics firms, regulatory and compliance partners, and specialized development organizations.

Entries were evaluated on four criteria: innovation and impact, measurable outcomes, sustainability and scalability, and ethical and regulatory adherence.

The 2026 judging panel included senior professionals from institutions that define the standard for drug development excellence.

Judges included

Steven Ferguson
Special Advisor
NIH Office of Technology Transfer

Dr. Wilfredo De Jesus-Monge
Chief Medical OfficerP
uerto Rico Science, Technology & Research Trust

Karthik Muthusamy
Head, Data Acquisition and Interfaces
Bristol-Myers Squibb

Neha Doshi
Associate Director, Portfolio Strategy & Analytics
Gilead Sciences

Subha Ilamathy
Senior AI Engineer
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Pradeep Reddy Guttha
Architecture & Strategy Asst. Director
Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Tanmay Sharma
Senior Director
Corcept Therapeutics

Anirudh Mehta
Sr. Engineer
Moderna Therapeutics

Akshay Phulgirkar
Senior Manager, MSAT
Moderna

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Why Novellia Won

Drug development has always depended on understanding how diseases progress and how treatments perform in real patients. The data needed to answer those questions exists. It lives inside the health records of patients scattered across hundreds of hospital systems, specialists, labs, and primary care providers that have never shared information with each other.

Traditional real-world data vendors work around that problem by assembling partial records from insurance claims and institutional feeds, without the patient ever being involved. The result is datasets that are incomplete, slow to build, and structurally limited in what they can show.

Novellia inverted the model. Its AI-powered platform gives patients a free tool to find and unify over 20 years of fragmented medical records in seconds. When patients choose to contribute that history to medical research, deidentified and anonymized, it becomes something the industry has never had before: a complete, longitudinal, patient-authorized record that traces back to an explicit consent event.

The platform's proprietary AI autonomously cleans, harmonizes, and structures both structured and unstructured EMR data across 250,000+ clinical sources, delivering analysis-ready datasets in days. With 20+ million records on platform and a 99%+ patient retention rate, the dataset grows richer over time rather than becoming stale.

The scientific outcomes reflect the depth of what this model produces.

In Project EVOLVE, a study examining real-world incidence of interstitial lung disease in HER2+ breast cancer patients conducted with Daiichi Sankyo, AstraZeneca, and PRIME Education, Novellia analyzed over 500,000 unique health records from 38 consented patients. The structured real-world data improved oncologist confidence in real-world ILD rates from 66% to 90%, a shift that directly changes how clinicians approach treatment decisions. Findings were presented at the 2024 ASCO Quality Care Symposium and the 2024 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

In a separate engagement supporting a rare genetic disorder, Novellia assembled 50+ patients with 20+ years of retrospective EMR history within three months of study launch. The sponsor had an abstract accepted at a scientific conference within six months of IRB approval.

Project EVEREST, launched in May 2025 with Daiichi Sankyo, Genentech, and AstraZeneca, applies the same infrastructure across early and metastatic breast cancer, measuring whether consolidating patients' complete medical histories reduces the time from initial appointment to first treatment decision.

The pattern across these engagements is consistent: existing partners expand their work with Novellia and bring peer organizations into the platform. That is the clearest signal of sustained data quality.

"The breakthroughs coming in medicine will be built on patient trust,” says Shashi Shankar, Co-founder and CEO of Novellia. “That is the resource the industry was missing, and it was missing because no one went to ask for it. Novellia built a system for the people carrying the heaviest diagnoses, cancer, chronic, and rare diseases. That relationship means researchers can finally see the full picture of how disease unfolds across real lives over real years. We are proud of this recognition. We are more proud of what it is going to make possible."

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What This Signals for Life Sciences

Novellia's customers include several of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world. Its data has been accepted at peer-reviewed oncology congresses. Its partners span Top-20 pharma and leading emerging biopharma. The next phase of its roadmap includes clinical genomics integration and claims data linkage at the individual patient level, moving toward a unified record spanning clinical, molecular, and behavioral dimensions of health.

The Fierce recognition confirms the direction. Patient-authorized real-world data is a credible, scalable category in life sciences. The breakthroughs coming in cancer, rare disease, and complex chronic conditions will be built on evidence generated from the source the industry spent decades working around.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Fierce Outsourcing Awards?

The Fierce Outsourcing Awards, formerly known as the Fierce CRO Awards, recognize the companies and teams that make modern drug development possible. Presented annually by Fierce, whose publications span pharma, biotech, and healthcare, the program honors organizations delivering scientific rigor, operational excellence, and trusted partnership across the outsourced drug development ecosystem. Entries are evaluated on innovation and impact, measurable outcomes, sustainability and scalability, and ethical and regulatory adherence.

What is the Fierce Outsourcing Award for Innovation in Drug Development?

The Innovation in Drug Development category recognizes the platform, technology, or outsourcing partner that has advanced how drugs are discovered, developed, or brought to patients in a demonstrably new way. It is one of eight categories in the annual Fierce Outsourcing Awards program, judged by senior professionals from leading pharmaceutical companies, research institutions, and health sciences organizations.

Who won the 2026 Fierce Outsourcing Award for Innovation in Drug Development?

Novellia won the 2026 Fierce Outsourcing Award for Innovation in Drug Development. Novellia is a patient-authorized real-world data company headquartered in New York City. Other finalists in the category included Altasciences, Inductive Bio, Luminary Therapeutics, Open Source Imaging Consortium, and Syngene International.

Who judged the 2026 Fierce Outsourcing Awards?

The 2026 judging panel included senior professionals from Gilead Sciences, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Moderna, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Corcept Therapeutics, and the NIH Office of Technology Transfer, among others. Judges evaluated entries on innovation and impact, measurable outcomes, sustainability and scalability, and ethical and regulatory adherence.

What is patient-authorized real-world data?

Patient-authorized real-world data is health information that patients have explicitly chosen to share with medical researchers. It is collected directly from patients who consent to their deidentified records being used in pharmaceutical and biotech research. This is distinct from claims-based or administratively sourced real-world data, which is assembled by third-party brokers using records patients did not directly contribute.

How is Novellia's real-world data different from traditional RWD?

Every record in Novellia's platform traces back to a patient who chose to participate. Traditional RWD is assembled by third-party brokers using insurance claims and hospital records collected without direct patient involvement or consent. Novellia's patient-authorized model produces longitudinal health data that is more complete, continuously updated as patients contribute ongoing records, and built on a consent architecture that legacy RWD vendors cannot replicate.

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