Industry 4.0

On a recent visit to Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, I had the chance to speak with Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president and general manager of healthcare. After asking about the pharma industry’s surging interest in AI, Powell remarked, “Every pharma knows who Nvidia is now.” Curious, I asked her, “How long has that…

AI algorithms offer a myriad of advantages for clinical trials. AI techniques can, for instance, support patient enrollment and site selection, improve data quality and enhance patient outcomes. AI algorithms — combined with an effective digital infrastructure — can also help aggregate and manage clinical trial data in real time, as Deloitte has noted. Last…

Pharma and biotech companies have had a spectrum of responses to the surge in generative artificial intelligence (AI). A recent Washington Post article describes an unnamed biotech firm that banned employees from using OpenAI’s ChatGPT despite its capability to bolster productivity given concerns over potential data leaks. At the same time, the burgeoning AI landscape…

Life sciences commercial services company Eversana is one of the latest to throw its hat into the generative AI ring. Tapping a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Everasana is focusing on developing generative AI technologies in the pharmaceutical industry. Also this month, the startup Synthetica Bio announced it would use generative AI to boost…

The journey to developing a successful drug, theoretically, may appear linear: you discover the right drug, find the suitable patient and administer it at the right time. The reality, however, often deviates from this straightforward path. Aligning these three variables remains notoriously difficult, often leading to elongated timelines strewn with failures, sometimes extending over a…

Today, the pharma sector, like many others, appears to be on the cusp of a transformation thanks to the influence of automation on drug discovery careers. Companies ranging from Insilico Medicine to Big Pharma firms like Janssen and Sanofi are putting AI at the heart of their operations. Many are increasingly recruiting workers from the…

The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi has unveiled a new AI-powered app called Plai, developed in partnership with AI platform Aily Labs. This move is part of Sanofi’s plan to become the pioneer in fully integrating AI into all operations, according to CEO Paul Hudson. Plai, designed to compile and process Sanofi’s internal data from various…

Top pharmaceutical companies sponsor over a hundred clinical trials annually, generating vast amounts of data. Harnessing this deluge is a monumental task. eClinical Solutions, led by CEO Raj Indupuri, tackles this through advanced applications of data analytics and machine learning with an emphasis on AI in clinical trials optimization. Specifically, eClinical Solutions taps AI/ML for…

Thanks to automation in pharmacovigilance, the next generation of safety is here — and with it, there is an immense opportunity for firms that can change how they work and maximize the opportunity automation creates. Leading safety teams are seeing up to 80% efficiency gains on key workflows by investing in touchless case processing, automating…

In the rapidly evolving landscape of quantum computing, Microsoft is pushing the boundaries with its Azure Quantum platform. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently announced, “Our goal is to compress the next 250 years of chemistry and material science progress into the next 25,” Nadella said. The executive also noted that, thanks to recent advances…

Insilico Medicine, an AI-based biotech startup, announced details of their first AI-designed drug candidate to enter human clinical trials. INS018_055 is an experimental treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare lung disease. Through their Insilico AI-driven drug discovery platform, they discovered and designed INS018_055 in just 30 months, significantly faster than the industry average. Phase…

The AI market is witnessing meteoric growth, with projections hinting at a potentially staggering increase over the next decade. Against this backdrop of rapid AI evolution, we recently spoke with Tehsin Syed, general manager of AWS Health. Syed shared that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seeing growing interest from Big Pharma firms. “Nine of the…

The meteoric rise of the AI sector is hard to fathom. Projections from Precedence Research suggest that the global AI market could balloon by 2600% from 2022 to 2032, hitting $1.87 trillion — an annual growth rate of 39%. In pharma, AI and data science demand is surging though overall growth is sluggish. Despite advances…

Quantum computing — described by pop astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as “computing with atoms” — is an emerging technology with a potential for immense computational speed and power. For some problems, quantum computers can be exponentially faster than classical computers, while for others the speedup may be more measured. The promise for drug discovery could…

Emerging as a spinoff from Alphabet’s experimental division X, SandboxAQ recently pulled back the curtain on its latest endeavor —  the biopharma molecular simulation division AQBioSim. The venture has attracted investments from significant figures like former Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt, who is now the chair of Sandbox AQ, and Salesforce.com Inc. founder Marc Benioff’s Time…

Big Pharma and researchers are sharpening their focus on AI to speed drug discovery. But the path to fully AI-driven drug discovery faces substantial hurdles, according to Adityo Prakash, CEO of Verseon. “When it comes to drug discovery, AI has a data problem with which the pharmaceutical industry has not yet come to terms,” he…

As personalized medicine continues to progress, cell and gene therapy (CGT) development is poised to enable tremendous medical breakthroughs. Unlike traditional treatments which merely manage symptoms, CGT could treat the root biological cause of many diseases: the faulty genes. “The cell and gene therapy space is truly exciting. What this ultimately means for patients and…

The rise of cloud-based systems and AI-assisted analysis has dramatically transformed the landscape of scientific research and collaboration. One striking example is the mRNA company Moderna, which used the cloud to develop and deliver its first clinical batch of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate for phase 1 trials in a mere 42 days after the initial…

Generative AI stands to add trillions of dollars of value to the world economy, according to a recent McKinsey report. The consultancy noted that about three-quarters of the value of generative AI spans four areas — customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering and R&D. The latter could see a 12% annual lift in global…

The fact that the biopharmaceutical industry has a large carbon footprint is well established. A 2022 study from My Green Lab confirmed that biotech and pharma are still among the globe’s top polluters. The research highlights that a mere 4% of the largest publicly-traded biotech and pharmaceutical firms have climate commitments in line with the…

Following the recent expansion of Amazon Omics, as covered in our previous article “Ready, set, analyze: Amazon Omics unveils new Ready2Run workflows”, we wanted to explore the role of third-party providers in shaping the landscape of genomic analysis and bioinformatics. NVIDIA is one of these providers. The GPU company has worked to integrate their Parabricks…

The development of new drugs is undeniably a data-intensive endeavor. Despite impressive advances in AI over the past years, researchers often continue to grapple with crushing data volumes. This hurdle is particularly apparent in clinical trials, where crucial data is often stored in machine-unfriendly formats such as PDFs, PowerPoint or HTML or other formats. This article explores…

The life sciences sector experienced an explosive boom during the pandemic’s early phase, followed by a slight cooling in funding in 2022. Despite this, the Barnes & Thornburg law firm’s 2023 Investment Funds Outlook report indicates that opportunities within the sector remain plentiful. John E. Kelly, a partner in the firm and chair of the…

The German multinational pharma and biotech colossus Bayer is taking further steps to ramp up its focus on digital health by launching a new business unit. In 2022, Bayer invested $9.5 million in Woebot Health, an AI-powered behavioral health platform company. In 2020, it launched a venture known as G4A Digital Health Partnership Program to…

Imagine a world where the process of developing life-saving drugs is as streamlined as a modern assembly line. In such a reality, generative AI in drug discovery might churn out promising compounds with similar efficiency and precision as a factory robot assembling a car. Moreover, such technology could chip away at the steep cost and…