AI Innovation in Real-World Evidence & Data Analytics
Volv Global has been selected as a finalist in the 2026 Fierce AI Innovation Awards, in the category AI Innovation in Real-World Evidence & Data Analytics. The submission recognised in this category covers population-scale AI for real-world evidence generation and clinical trial enrichment across rare and difficult-to-diagnose diseases.
The Fierce AI Innovation Awards are run by Fierce Life Sciences Events and draw entries from across the healthcare and life sciences industry. This year’s panel of expert judges evaluated submissions on innovation, impact, execution, scalability, and industry relevance. Volv Global is among four finalists in the RWE and data analytics category, alongside Flatiron Health, Verantos, and Rune Labs.
Our submission
The work recognised here spans several years of production-deployed programmes built in close collaboration with pharmaceutical partners across the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom.
At its centre is Volv Global’s approach to rare disease detection: applying a proprietary machine learning methodology to population-scale real-world data to surface patients who are living with a condition but have not yet received a diagnosis. In diseases where the diagnostic odyssey routinely exceeds six years, and where the gap between biological onset and clinical recognition can span a decade, the question of who is missing from the diagnosed population matters as much as any question in drug development.
The programmes reviewed by the judges include work in alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD), acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), and Fabry disease, conducted with pharmaceutical and clinical partners across Komodo Health claims data (6.2 million or more records), the OPCRD UK primary care database, and Cleveland Clinic’s electronic medical records. In each setting, the core scientific challenge was the same: to find people with a rare condition before the diagnostic system does, and to do so with the precision, interpretability, and clinical accountability that pharmaceutical-grade real-world evidence demands.
Across those programmes, the evidence demonstrates that this is achievable, at scale, across different disease settings, different data environments, and different healthcare systems.
What recognition means to us
Being selected as a finalist alongside organisations that operate at the scale of our esteemed co-finalists is meaningful confirmation that the approach Volv Global has developed over more than eight years is scientifically credible and commercially relevant at the highest level of the industry.
It is also a reflection of the people who made this work possible: the clinical and scientific collaborators at institutions including Cleveland Clinic, the pharmaceutical teams at Takeda, CSL Behring, and Sanofi who committed to rigorous, evidence-led programmes, and the patients whose records, in aggregate and fully de-identified, made the analysis possible
Winners will be announced in the Fierce AI Innovation Awards Special Report on 2 September 2026.
Links:
- Fierce AI Innovation Awards 2026
- Finalist in category: AI Innovation in Real-World Evidence & Data Analytics
- Fierce Life Sciences Events
- Volv Global proprietary machine learning methodology
- Volv Global AATD case study (webinar): How AI-driven insights from RWD accelerate the diagnosis and treatment of undiagnosed patients
- Volv Global AATD case study (posters at ATS 2025)
- Volv Global AATD case study (posters at ATS 2024)
- Volv Global Fabry disease case study: Detecting signs of Fabry and Pompe disease in UK clinical data
