AlphaSense and Cortellis

When conducting market intelligence in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors, you need access to the right information, as well as a way to separate relevant insights from extraneous noise. Staying ahead in this space means being the first to know of regulatory activities, new drug approvals, clinical trial pipelines, disease landscapes, BD&L, and commercialization decisions.

In addition to having access to the right data, you need adequate context that helps you answer the questions:

• What does this mean for my organization?
• How does this affect our competitors?
• What is likely to happen next?

This is why most of the top healthcare and pharma organizations use both a traditional life sciences database, such as Cortellis, and an AI-powered market intelligence platform like AlphaSense.

Cortellis is built on structured datasets, making it a useful tool for looking up specific technical facts, such as a drug's exact mechanism of action, patent expiration date, or current trial phase. However, the platform’s focus on structured data means a complementary platform like AlphaSense is needed for content such as earnings transcripts, broker reports, and expert calls. Additionally, Cortellis lacks advanced AI-powered search and generative AI capabilities that are necessary to synthesize and interrogate large volumes of unstructured content.

AlphaSense fills this gap by enabling teams to quickly surface themes, sentiment shifts, risk signals, and strategic positioning across thousands of documents in seconds. Instead of manually combing through transcripts or analyst notes, users can ask complex, natural-language questions and receive synthesized answers grounded in primary source material. This allows teams to move beyond static facts and understand how assets are being perceived, how strategies are evolving, and where potential inflection points may emerge.

Used together, the two platforms provide a more complete intelligence picture. Cortellis answers precise, data-driven questions about what is happening in the pipeline and regulatory landscape, while AlphaSense provides insight into how stakeholders are interpreting those developments and what they may signal for the future. For life sciences teams making high-stakes decisions in business development, portfolio strategy, or competitive intelligence, combining structured drug data with real-time market and expert perspectives leads to faster, more confident decision-making.

Below, we discuss AlphaSense and Cortellis — covering key features, strengths, and weaknesses — to illustrate how the two platforms fit together and how using both can take your healthcare and pharma market research to the next level.

AlphaSense

Best for: Enhancing the value of life sciences databases through integration, AI capabilities, and additional external qualitative and quantitative sources that provide key context

AlphaSense is not a life sciences database, nor is it intended only for life sciences customers. Instead, it is an AI-driven market research platform that offers a centralized library of premium and proprietary content sets, extensive quantitative data, and AI capabilities for both real-time monitoring and historical research. AlphaSense is ideal for life sciences organizations that want to layer real-time qualitative insights and market context on top of traditional drug and healthcare data to enable faster, more confident decision-making.

The benefit of incorporating AlphaSense into your research workflow, whether as a standalone tool or as a complement to a traditional life sciences database, is that you get contextual intelligence across the full market narrative — not just drug data.

AlphaSense’s features include:

Premium External Market Intelligence

AlphaSense provides access to differentiated content that helps teams interpret what clinical and regulatory developments mean in practice:

• Broker reports from top Wall Street firms that help healthcare leaders understand how clinical, regulatory, and competitive developments are being interpreted by the market
• Earnings call transcripts and management commentary that reveal strategic priorities, commercial expectations, capital allocation decisions, and emerging risks directly from company leadership
• Expert call transcripts featuring KOLs, former regulators, and industry specialists that provide deeper interpretation of clinical data, trial design, regulatory dynamics, and standard-of-care shifts
• News and regulatory coverage to proactively monitor emerging risks and competitive moves

AlphaSense also provides cross-industry intelligence spanning biotech, healthcare services, diagnostics, medtech, and macroeconomic trends that surfaces external forces — from pricing pressure to policy shifts to capital markets dynamics — that materially impact life sciences strategy.

Integrated Internal Data

Users can also integrate and query their own internal content in AlphaSense alongside the premium external sources listed above. This can be particularly valuable for users with access to both AlphaSense and Cortellis.

By utilizing APIs, life sciences teams can merge insights from both platforms into internal dashboards. Furthermore, strategy teams can take the deep technical reports they generate using Cortellis data and upload them into AlphaSense’s enterprise search environment. They can then use AlphaSense’s AI to search and summarize their own proprietary technical research, alongside global news, broker reports, and expert calls, ensuring no strategic connections are missed.

Financial Data

AlphaSense provides access to the following crucial quantitative insights:

• Historical Financials & Estimates: Standardized statements and consensus data across 19,000+ public companies
• Sector-Specific KPIs: Detailed operating metrics sourced from institutional-grade Canalyst models
• Transaction Intelligence: Details on nearly 1 million M&A deals and 750,000 private funding rounds, enriched with AI-generated deal rationale and strategic context
• Dynamic Peer Sets: 125+ pre-built industry comparables with sector-specific metrics

AI Search and Summarization Technology

AlphaSense’s AI features help users extract crucial insights from each data source, enabling you to reduce research time, anticipate competitive moves earlier, and make faster, more confident strategic decisions.

Generative Search

With Generative Search, you can ask natural-language questions and source intelligence at scale from specific sources, including ClinicalTrials.gov, FDA, EMA, and PubMed — or from across our entire aggregated library of content. Generative Search will instantly return citable, verifiable answers, and you can dive deeper into each topic by asking follow-up questions or clicking into the source.

You can also take Generative Search on the go with our mobile app, giving you access to instant answers, wherever you work.

Generative Grid

Generative Grid applies multiple genAI prompts to many documents at the same time to quickly provide organized answers to research questions at scale, in an easy-to-read table format. Generative Grid pulls data from both premium external documents in the AlphaSense platform and users’ internal content. Users can leverage this tool to track clinical trials, compare competitors at a glance, parse through medical studies in seconds, track biopharma deal activity, or analyze merger proxy filings, among many other use cases.

Smart Summaries

Every earnings transcript in AlphaSense features an AI-generated Smart Summary, which creates a tearsheet of key takeaways, analyst Q&A, and the most critical topics discussed in each call. Life sciences professionals can use Smart Summaries to instantly extract key insights from competitors’ earnings transcripts.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis, an NLP-based feature, parses content and identifies nuances in language such as tone and subjective meaning. It then uses color coding to help users identify instances of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment throughout the document.

Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools

AlphaSense is designed to help users uncover insights faster with the following tools:

• Customizable dashboards create a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored alerts provide real-time updates.
• Powerful collaboration tools like Notebook and commenting features help teams manage and share insights more effectively.
• Table Tools allow you to move faster with spreadsheet-style visualizations directly from company filings, so you can chain together, edit, and optimize tables for analysis.
• Image Search allows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly return data without reading through pages of documents.
• Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly assess any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
• A mobile app that lets you track real-time alerts and run AI searches on the go, ensuring you never miss a critical insight.
• Automated Monitoring allows you to set up real-time alerts that send instant updates on any relevant market movements, news, emerging trends, and competitor activities. We also generate snapshots of companies and topics regularly that keep you ahead of the curve with actionable insights.

AlphaSense Pros:

• Extensive content database that spans key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news, and regulatory sites
• Extensive quantitative insights and financial data workflow and analysis tools
• AI and genAI tools that users can apply to integrated internal content alongside platform content
• 4,500+ pre-built financial models that update automatically
• Live transcripts that allow users to view past, present, and future event transcripts in a calendar and view event transcripts in real time
• Automated and customizable real-time alerts
• All-in-one research platform
• User-friendly interface
• Internal note-taking, sharing, and collaboration features
• Support for APIs and integrations
• Supports enterprise-level organizations and teams
• A mobile app designed for on-the-go workflows, providing access to our full content library, generative search, and alerts
• Excellent customer support team, including 24/7 chat with product specialists, a Live Help button on the website, and regular live AlphaSense Education webinars

AlphaSense Cons:

• Visualization tools are limited at this time
• Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses

Cortellis

Best for: Deep pipeline, clinical, regulatory, and R&D intelligence

Developed by U.K. analytics firm Clarivate, Cortellis is a comprehensive pharmaceutical intelligence platform that has cemented its role as the industry's leading source for the "compliance and creation" phases of a drug’s development. It is deeply embedded in the life sciences sector, utilized by each of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies.

Cortellis integrates disparate information (patents, clinical trials, regulatory filings, deals, targets, safety data, and more) into a unified platform designed to accelerate evidence-based decisions in pharma and biotech. It is best suited for R&D scientists, regulatory affairs professionals, clinical operations professionals, and IP attorneys.

Cortellis’s key features include:

Deep Curated Data

Cortellis data is manually curated by Ph.D.-level scientists and enriched with disease-specific taxonomies. Built-in datasets include:

• Comprehensive global drug pipeline data, including assets in discovery through post-approval
• Detailed clinical trial intelligence, including study design, endpoints, timelines, sponsors, and geographies
• Global regulatory tracking, including approvals, designations, and guidance updates
• Patent and generics intelligence, including exclusivity timelines and Paragraph IV activity
• Curated deal and licensing data, with structured terms and transaction insights

Because the data spans across assets, indications, companies, and geographies, users can benchmark competitors, analyze therapeutic landscapes, and assess portfolio risk with confidence. Importantly, Cortellis lacks company documents, such as earnings transcripts and filings, broker reports, and expert calls. This means that, while it is a valuable source of structured data, it does not provide the necessary context to explain the “why” behind each datapoint.

Specialized Modules

Cortellis is separated into several deep-dive modules that each focus on a different set of use cases. These modules include:

• Competitive Intelligence and Portfolio Strategy – Monitor competitor pipelines, assess probability of success, model timelines, and benchmark portfolios.
• Clinical and Regulatory Intelligence – Track global trials, analyze protocol design, and anticipate regulatory milestones or hurdles.
• Discovery and Preclinical Intelligence – Evaluate targets, mechanisms of action, and translational data to inform early-stage R&D prioritization.
• Deals and Generics Intelligence – Benchmark licensing structures, track M&A activity, and anticipate lifecycle threats.
• Safety and Systems Biology – Analyze toxicity, pathway interactions, and biological networks to reduce risk in development.

This modular approach enables users across R&D, business development, regulatory, and competitive intelligence teams to work from a shared data backbone while focusing on their domain-specific priorities. However, it also can create some fragmentation, since not all users have access to all modules.

AI Capabilities

Cortellis incorporates AI and advanced analytics to enhance discovery and decision-making across its datasets.

AI capabilities include:

• Predictive modeling of probability of technical and regulatory success
• Automated data harmonization and entity linking across assets, companies, and indications
• Intelligent alerts and monitoring across selected drugs, competitors, and therapy areas
• Enhanced search and filtering capabilities to accelerate complex landscape analysis

Cortellis’ AI is primarily focused on structured data modeling and predictive analytics, helping users reduce manual research time and improve confidence in portfolio and competitive decisions. However, because Cortellis lacks generative search or summarization capabilities, it can leave users vulnerable to blind spots or missing important context around a particular development. That’s where AlphaSense can be highly useful.

For instance, if Cortellis alerts a user that a competitor's clinical trial status has officially changed to “Suspended,” the user can immediately pivot to AlphaSense to search recent earnings transcripts, expert calls, or broker reports to uncover why it was delayed (e.g., discovering an executive mentioned a localized supply chain constraint or a specific safety signal).

Cortellis Pros:

• Robust database covering over 800,000 drugs and biologics, 700,000 clinical trials, 3 million drug safety alerts, and 300,000 regulatory documents
• Organizations can purchase specific modules rather than the full suite
• Robust regulatory intelligence
• Robust patent intelligence
• Includes AI-driven predictive and analytical capabilities

Cortellis Cons:

• Primarily structured data with limited narrative context
• Modules result in some data fragmentation
• No generative AI or sentiment analysis
• No broker reports to help pharma leaders understand how clinical, regulatory, and competitive developments are being interpreted by the market
• No earnings call or expert call transcripts that reveal strategic priorities, commercial expectations, capital allocation decisions, and emerging risks directly from company leadership
• No expert call transcripts featuring KOLs, former regulators, and industry specialists that provide deeper interpretation of clinical data, trial design, regulatory dynamics, and standard-of-care shifts

AlphaSense and Cortellis: Better Together

Cortellis and AlphaSense are not substitutes — they are strategic complements. Cortellis delivers the structured, scientifically curated foundation life sciences teams rely on to understand pipelines, regulatory milestones, patents, and probability of success. AlphaSense layers on the market narrative: how leadership teams are framing developments, how analysts are interpreting data, how experts are reacting to trial results, and where competitive sentiment is shifting in real time.

In an industry where a single data point can move markets, reshape portfolios, or alter strategy, structured data alone is not enough — and neither is unstructured insight without a factual backbone. The most sophisticated healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations recognize that confident decision-making requires both.

If your team already relies on Cortellis for deep drug and clinical intelligence, AlphaSense can amplify its value by connecting those datapoints to the broader market conversation, while layering advanced AI that allows you to get maximum value from each insight. The result is accelerated research, fewer blind spots, and more proactive strategic moves.