Big pharma is embracing the potential of AI
PAUL HUDSON, boss of Sanofi, is proudly displaying an iPhone. He is eager to showcase the French drugmaker’s new artificial-intelligence (AI) app, plai. It utilizes over 1 billion data points to provide easily digestible information, ranging from alerts about low drug stocks to discussion points for a meeting with an advertising agency or suggestions for setting up clinical trial sites that could expedite drug approvals. Similar to Netflix recommendations, plai delivers timely “nudges,” as Mr. Hudson refers to them, that are relevant in the moment. He jests that plai broke even within approximately four hours and emphasizes that the cost is minimal compared to the $300-400 million that large consultancies charge for data curation projects for major companies. One out of every ten of Sanofi’s 80,000 employees uses it daily.
AI is not a new concept in the pharmaceutical industry. Biotech firms have been experimenting with it for years. However, now there is growing interest from major pharmaceutical companies. Last year, Emma Walmsley, CEO of GSK, stated that AI could enhance the productivity of research and development, which is the industry’s most significant challenge. Moderna recently described itself as “laser-focused” on AI. Sanofi is fully committed. According to Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, the pharmaceutical industry may be spending $50 billion per year on AI for expediting drug development within the next decade.
Most of the excitement revolves around AIs trained on biological data that could improve the hit-and-miss process of drug discovery. Developing drugs can take up to a decade, cost billions of dollars, and have a success rate of only 10%. Even a slight improvement in speed and efficiency would be immensely valuable. However, scientists have struggled to handle biological big data using traditional statistical tools. Machine learning enables the sifting through vast amounts of information, including clinical patient data, genome sequences, and body scan images. Last year, DeepMind, an AI lab affiliated with Google, achieved a breakthrough with its AlphaFold system, which can predict…
2023-07-13 07:58:53
Post from www.economist.com
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