Almirall’s MES/MOM director Francesc Luque is spearheading a digital transformation of the company’s pharmaceutical manufacturing, shifting from paper-based and disconnected systems to a fully integrated, “smart plant” model. In a role he assumed in early 2023, the main shift has been consolidating the company’s “Integrated Factory” program and finalizing the definition of its Manufacturing Execution…
Roche, Novartis lead 2024’s top 50 pharma in oncology (YTD)
Swiss pharma giants Novartis and Roche consistently rank among the top pharma companies in terms of revenue. In 2024, the two companies are also leading in total international patent volume. Meanwhile, smaller firms like Incyte and Vertex Pharma are punching above their weight in market impact. For instance, Incyte, with a market cap of just…
The roadmap to effective AI-driven drug development
Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has captivated the world, and for good reason. Platforms like ChatGPT have demonstrated capabilities that gave the general public a deeper understanding of AI’s capabilities. AI, too, is showing potential in drug discovery. From designing novel drug molecules to predicting protein structures, AI is offering a new path forward, potentially accelerating…
ChatRWD outperforms tech giants in medical question-answering
When it comes to medical AI, the biggest names aren’t necessarily delivering the best results. While tech giants race to build ever-larger language models, a new preprint reveals that when it comes to clinical accuracy and physician trust, a smaller player is outperforming the industry heavyweights. Putting large language model-based systems to the test Researchers…
87% of pharma leaders say AI is crucial, Accenture study finds
In some ways, machine learning is nothing new. The term itself dates back to 1958 when the computer scientist Arthur Lee Samuel coined it. “The pharmaceutical industry has been using data science, machine learning, and AI in some form for at least 25 years, if not longer,” said Kailash Swarna, a managing director and Accenture…
4 waves of NLP techniques and how to stitch them together
While clinical trials and regulatory filings offer a semi-structured view of drug safety, a large amount of insights lie in sources ranging from patient support programs (PSPs) to social media posts. As Natural Language Processing (NLP) evolves, a growing number of tools are becoming available to unlock this potential. Deepanshu Saini, Director of Program Management…
What if AI makes good on its promise to reshape the pharma productivity?
One of the top promises of artificial intelligence/machine learning in drug discovery is reversing decades of dwindling productivity. But imagine if the technology makes good on its promise. And perhaps six or seven years from now, in which productivity is doubled, leaving pharma firms to have, theoretically, early stage pipelines that are twice as large.…
Aleksandra Zuraw on how digital pathology can drive faster drug development and enhanced accuracy
In the emerging field of digital pathology, Aleksandra Zuraw, DVM, Ph.D., DACVP, is one of the most prominent voices. Her journey to this position, however, was far from straightforward. When Zuraw was 12, she dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, picturing herself following in the footsteps of the British veterinary surgeon James Herriot, tending to “All Creatures…
Why the plasticity of biology may be AI’s hardest challenge
The potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate medical discovery is immense, particularly within the dynamic and mutable area of biology. Unlike the more predictable fields of chemistry and physics, biology presents unique challenges due to its complexity and constant adaptation, areas where AI can play a transformative role but has been limited to date…
Novo Holdings’ $16.5 billion Catalent buy leads 2024’s M&A deals so far
In the first five months of 2024, there was a surge in high-value deals, though none have yet matched the scale of Pfizer’s $43 billion acquisition of Seagen, which closed in December 2023. With Novo Holdings’ $16.5 billion purchase of Catalent leading the pack, 2024 reflects a mixed but strong trend toward sizable M&A…
Deep Origin’s Balto AI Assistant offers bespoke drug discovery tools via a chat interface
After ChatGPT debuted in late 2022 and GPT-4 hit the scene in March of the following year, many executives at pharma companies sat up and took note, interested in new tech that could accelerate the stubbornly slow drug development process. Translating that vision into reality, however, is not straightforward and a significant number of pharma…
25-plus years of Big Pharma megadeals
In February, Novo Holdings announced one of the largest M&A deals in recent memory with its plans to acquire Catalent, a leading contract drug manufacturer, for a cool $16.5 billion. The deal could accelerate production of Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss medications, Ozempic and Wegovy, given skyrocketing demand. But while the Novo-Catalent deal marks…
Where are the U.S. pharma and biotech jobs in mid-2024?
Many of the job cuts in 2024 are in Massachusetts, but the state still has one of the densest concentrations of job listings based on a dataset of more than 3,300 online job postings from May. Yet the Northeast Megalopolis excluding the Bay State was home to more jobs overall, with states such as…
How drug developers can escape from the clinical trial phase maze
It’s something of a truism that about nine out of ten drug candidates in clinical trials fail to reach the market. While some amount of guess-work is unavoidable in drug development, Dr. Ali Pashazadeh, co-founder and CEO of Treehill Partners sees faulty decision-making and poor communication as chief factors contributing to high failure rate. While…
New SEC rules and Cencora breach result in surge of pharma data breach disclosures
The pharmaceutical industry is grappling with the consequences of a significant data breach at Cencora, the prominent drug distributor formerly known as AmerisourceBergen. Recent cybersecurity rules from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissions (SEC), which came into effect in December 2023, have also played a role in a wave of data breach reports, highlighting the…
The pay gap: Best paid in pharma still not anywhere close to other industries
An analysis of 19 prominent pharma companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Lilly, Roche, Merck & Co. among others, revealed that the average stock return was 3.7% points in 2023. (Lilly was the best performing with a return of 59% while Moderna was the worst in the list with a return of –44%.) By…
Which metro areas and states have the most biopharma jobs?
The Greater Boston Area, New York City Metro and San Francisco Bay Area are the top three hubs for biopharma job listings based on an analysis of more than 1,700 recent job postings. Within these hubs, prominent job listing title examples include Vice President of Intellectual Property, Scientist (Bioassay) and Data Scientist I and Research…
Sanofi-OpenAI-Formation Bio partnership the latest in a string of life science genAI announcements
While there are currently no FDA-approved AI-discovered drugs, interest in generative AI (genAI) could be a game-changer for the pharmaceutical industry in the coming years. Sanofi, which has signaled its intent to go “all in” on AI, has inked a deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Formation Bio to build AI-powered software to speed drug…
Pharma and biotech salary review: Who’s earning the most in 2024?
Using job posting data gathered via the data aggregation service Apify.com, we sifted through a total of 1,755 recent pharma and biotech job listings to find, unsurprisingly, that managers working in senior and director-level roles are the best-paid in the industry. Across the entire data set, the median salary range for the job descriptions was…
Biopharma clusters in flux: Who’s hiring, firing and building in biopharma in the first half of 2024
The biopharma’s layoff woes continue to make headlines, but the news is not all negative. To get a clearer picture, we gathered data on layoffs, new plant announcements and companies hiring, including specific coordinates for locations down to the address level, when possible. After clustering the data, we identified the top- and worst-performing global hubs.…
Best practices to overcome communication breakdowns in pharma manufacturing
The success of any organization is dependent on consistent, clear, and reliable information sharing among all internal stakeholders. In the pharmaceutical industry, where there are multiple complex layers within manufacturing processes, communication among teams is especially critical. If information-sharing gaps occur among these layers, vulnerabilities could result in costly errors impacting all levels of the…
Beyond chemotherapy: The rise of precision medicine with radionuclide drug conjugates
Radionuclide Drug Conjugates (RDCs) hold the potential to transform cancer treatment by offering effective, precise treatment and diagnosis with minimal side effects. Regulators have already approved several RDCs around the world, and more are in the pipeline as researchers seek to further improve their efficacy, safety, and personalization. RDCs have evolved from other branches of…
Longevity biotech gaining momentum as demographic shifts drive demand for healthy aging
Is aging a disease or a natural process? That question has emerged as a point of debate among researchers, medical professionals and philosophers. Some, like biogerontologist David Gems, argue that lines between aging and disease are frequently blurry, and that intervening in the aging process “protects against the totality of age-related diseases.” Other researchers such…
Pharma’s cultural barriers could blunt AI progress despite pressures for more efficient drug approvals.
The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) recently unveiled the launch of the CDER Center for Clinical Trial Innovation (C3TI), which aims to drive clinical trial innovation. When asked to assess the potential impact of the center, Charles Fisher, founder and CEO of Unlearn, said: “The truth is, I don’t know. I’m sort…
Meet AlphaFold 3, which can accurately model more than 99% of molecular types in the Protein Data Bank
Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind have unveiled AlphaFold 3, a powerful AI system that draws on a novel diffusion-based architecture to accurately model the structures of complexes containing proteins, nucleic acids, DNA and RNA strands, small molecules, ions and modified residues. Diffusion models are a type of generative model that has won significant popularity in…