How AstraZeneca Accelerates Drug Discovery with GitHub Copilot and Actions
AstraZeneca, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, unified 5,000 developers and scientists onto GitHub Enterprise, automated CI/CD with GitHub Actions, and deployed GitHub Copilot — achieving a 40% increase in developer velocity in its pilot program and generating 9 to 10 additional hours of productive output per developer each week. With drug development timelines measured in decades, the company views even marginal acceleration as directly impacting patient outcomes.
Impact
40%
Developer velocity increase with GitHub Copilot
9–10 hours
Extra productive output per developer weekly
100% in one year
Automated CI/CD activity increase
5,000
Developers consolidated on GitHub
~20,000
Repositories migrated
Challenge
AstraZeneca’s 3,000-person engineering and research workforce used a fragmented mix of tools including Bitbucket and satellite systems, producing inconsistent CI/CD pipelines and making it difficult to apply uniform security standards or spot defects early in the development cycle.
Solution
AstraZeneca consolidated all 5,000 developers onto GitHub Enterprise, standardized CI/CD through reusable GitHub Actions libraries that embed security and testing by default, and deployed GitHub Copilot to reduce repetitive coding work and accelerate output across engineering and research teams.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“The adoption of industry-standard platforms like GitHub has significantly streamlined our onboarding process. New engineers immediately recognize the value of working with familiar, cutting-edge development tools.”
“Every automated CI/CD pipeline that executes represents value and efficiency. The ease of use and robust functionality of GitHub Actions has been a true game changer for scaling automation across our entire organization.”
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Full Story
AstraZeneca develops and manufactures prescription medicines for oncology, cardiovascular, respiratory, and rare disease patients globally. Its engineering and data science workforce of more than 5,000 people includes not only software engineers but also computational scientists and researchers who write code as part of drug discovery pipelines. For a company whose core mission is measured in years — a single drug can take over a decade from concept to patient — any technology that accelerates the engineering layer has compounding effects on the business.
Before moving to GitHub, AstraZeneca’s software teams operated across a fragmented mix of tools including Bitbucket and various satellite systems. With roughly 3,000 people accessing source code, collaboration was difficult and deployments were inconsistent. CI/CD pipelines varied by team, making it hard to apply security standards uniformly or spot defects early. The company recognized an opportunity to standardize and accelerate, but the migration itself was high-stakes: 20,000 repositories and 3,000 users couldn’t afford a disruption to business-critical work like clinical trial systems or AI-powered drug discovery platforms.
AstraZeneca approached the migration with a full year of planning followed by a four-month execution phase. The team used GitHub Issues and Actions for the technical repository moves and built custom software to automate the human-side logistics — scheduling, outreach, and permission recreation — for every team. Nearly 99% of the company’s developers and source code were consolidated onto GitHub by the end. The success drew another 2,000 developers and data scientists to adopt the platform organically within the same year, bringing total adoption to 5,000 seats. The team then built a library of reusable GitHub Actions that embedded critical processes — security scanning, automated testing, artifact creation — into every workflow as standard building blocks, doubling the volume of automated CI/CD events within a year.
GitHub Copilot came next. Adoption in a highly regulated pharmaceutical environment required careful governance, and AstraZeneca waited for GitHub’s enterprise legal indemnification before proceeding — a prerequisite to protect the company’s intellectual property. Once that was in place, early results from the Copilot pilot program showed a 40% increase in developer velocity and an estimated 9 to 10 additional hours of output per developer each week. Two-thirds of active users reported that Copilot meaningfully reduced the time they spent on repetitive coding tasks, freeing them to focus on the complex work that only they can do.
For AstraZeneca, the stakes of these gains are unusually high. Every week shaved off the development of a cancer therapy or clinical data platform means that therapy reaches patients sooner. The engineering organization now operates as an active accelerant for the company’s core scientific mission — with automated quality checks catching defects in hours rather than weeks, security embedded by default, and AI assistance compressing the time between an idea and a working implementation.