Pharma and life sciences

Pharma and life sciences covers the software and instruments behind new medicines, following a medicine from the laboratory to the patient. It helps scientists find the molecule that acts on a disease, runs the instruments on the lab bench and the software of the laboratory, and runs the clinical trials that test the medicine in people, whether for the drug company itself or through a contract research organisation. It then helps make the drug to strict quality rules, sell it to doctors and insurers, and learn from real patients' records what it did after launch. This Industry Vertical holds the companies that build all of it.

India supplies medicines to much of the world, and it does much of this industry's software and data work too. Thermo Fisher Scientific, Agilent Technologies and Waters Corporation build their instrument software in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and Veeva Systems builds its drug-industry cloud in Hyderabad. ValGenesis, founded by Indian entrepreneurs, builds the validation software of drug plants in Chennai and Hyderabad, and Axtria, also Indian-founded, builds commercial analytics for drug companies. The engineering centres that the global drug makers run for themselves are told separately. (More on them in Parent Industry 5, Inside pharma, medical and healthcare companies, in the GCC collection.)

For an engineer, this is software that a drug regulator inspects. Every step of a trial and every batch made in a plant has to be recorded and proved, so test engineers are far more common here than at a typical product company, and .NET, data and embedded firmware engineers are in strong demand too. Java and cloud engineers are rare, and the door for juniors is wider than average.

Pharma and life sciences is one of the Industry Verticals of Domain VI, Healthtech and life sciences. Every company named on this page has posted software engineering jobs in India.

The seven Market Segments

The Market Segments follow a medicine in order, from the molecule found and tested in the lab, through the trial, to the plant that makes it, the market that buys it and the patients who use it.

AI drug discovery platforms

Software and AI models that help find and design new molecules come from companies like OpenEye, Albert Invent, Elucidata and Enveda.

Life science instruments and lab software

The instruments of research and quality-control laboratories, and the software that runs the lab, come from companies like Thermo Fisher Scientific, Agilent Technologies, Waters Corporation and Illumina.

Clinical trial software

The software that captures, checks and reports a trial's data comes from companies like Veeva Systems, eClinical Solutions, Signant Health and Clario.

Contract research organisations (CROs)

Companies that run trials for drug makers with software of their own include Emmes and Cytel.

Pharma manufacturing and quality software

Validation, factory-floor and quality software, and the tracking of every pack through the supply chain, come from companies like ValGenesis, Leucine and TraceLink.

Pharma commercial analytics

The data and analysis behind selling a drug, its price and its sales teams come from companies like Norstella, IntegriChain, Axtria and ZoomRx.

Real-world evidence (RWE) platforms

Learning what a medicine did for millions of patients after launch is the work of companies like Truveta, nference and ConcertAI.

Who they hire

What pharma and life sciences companies hire software engineers for, and which roles they hire, is on the Pharma and life sciences hiring page.

That is Pharma and life sciences, a medicine's journey from the lab bench to the patient, and the software at every step.