Carterra announced a research collaboration with AstraZeneca to develop hardware and software aimed at advancing lab-in-the loop drug discovery. The effort brings together scientific and technical expertise to connect laboratory systems, software and data infrastructure with artificial intelligence (AI)-driven discovery workflows. Lab-in-the-loop – the model in which AI systems propose drug candidates, wet-lab experiments generate data to test those predictions, and the resulting data feeds back to refine the next round of AI-guided design – is a growing area of interest to the pharmaceutical industry. A July 2026 Leerink Partners report described lab-in-the-loop as an emerging paradigm reshaping antibody discovery. A similar William Blair analysis pointed to the same shift as a driver of increased wet-lab data generation industry-wide. Many of the largest biopharma have described efforts to link AI models directly to autonomous laboratory experimentation.