IQVIA Rebrands Internal Language Division as Linguamatics

Five years after IQVIA quietly purchased UK-based natural language processing (NLP) provider Linguamatics, the company has announced that it has rebranded the division to include its internal language services. IQVIA is one of the world’s largest clinical research organizations (CRO) with revenues of over USD 15 bn and a market capitalization north of USD 40 bn.

Linguamatics, which was founded in 2001, specializes in NLP-based text mining to enable pharma-biotech and healthcare companies to speed up the drug discovery cycle.

According to the new Linguamatics website, the newly branded division leverages this legacy technology, and focuses on delivering “AI-enabled language and translation solutions”, which are “specifically built for healthcare and life sciences workflows.”

Richard Parnell, General Manager of Linguamatics, told Slator that the division will remain fully owned by IQVIA, and that “this integration fosters collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the cross-pollination of ideas, leading to more innovative and comprehensive language solutions.”

Parnell added that “keeping Linguamatics as a separately branded division within IQVIA enables focused expertise, integrated AI-enabled language solutions, and collaboration with customers, all of which contribute to delivering specialized and effective language solutions to every organization in the healthcare and life sciences industries.”

Linguamatics’ Parnell told Slator that the company sees “numerous opportunities for natural language processing (NLP) within the life sciences industry.”

“We use our NLP solutions to extract valuable insights from vast and complex unstructured data, documents generated in drug development, real-world data, and many other sources of internal and external data. […] Linguamatics marries [this] NLP technology with global translation solutions to scale these opportunities across languages and geographies”, he said.

On Linguamatics’ website, the language services provider also references its own translation management portal, Linguamatics Hub, as well as an instant machine translation solution, Linguamatics Translate. It also has an NLP content store which contains over 350 biomedical documents for data mining.

The division hopes to continue advancing its language technologies with the latest advancements in Generative AI to expand its language services offering.

“By staying at the forefront of language technologies and understanding the unique requirements of the healthcare and life sciences industry, Linguamatics aims to drive innovation, deliver exceptional language solutions, and contribute to the continued progress of the sector, and ultimately improve patient outcomes”, Parnell concluded.

The rebranding is part of a broader shift by large CROs to move from being a key client of language service providers to becoming a key competitor. In 2022, CRO Clario invested in a proprietary TMS. And on a SlatorPod episode in mid-2023 Brian Mallon, Senior Vice President of Commercializations & Outcomes at ICON plc, a top tier CRO, explained how their decision to increasingly insource language services was motivated by factors including cost savings, increased efficiency, faster turnaround times, and the importance of data security and confidentiality.