Uncategorized

Pharmaceutical companies could slash their pharmacovigilance costs by half while significantly improving accuracy through generative AI, according to IQVIA’s Global Practice Lead of Pharmacovigilance Technologies, Uwe Trinks. “The idea is: we can save 50% of the cost and get the quality to above 99%,” Trinks said. “That means when we have human verification, we only…

ChatGPT may be one of the quickest adopted tech platforms in recent memory, but the potential of it and other large language models ability transform the world has also been met with occasional provider outages, hallucinations, and memory problems. “There’s a lot of resentment towards the hype,” notes Christopher M. McSpiritt, head of life sciences…

What if physicians could predict which cancer treatments will work best for individual patients using just their tumor images? The precision oncology company Pangea Biomed made strides in that direction with the publication of its AI-powered ENLIGHT-DP method in Nature Cancer. This technology taps deep learning, an ever-more-popular type of machine learning with a large…

A new study, published by Frontiers in Space, reveals promising results from an experiment on the International Space Station (ISS) for treating and preventing post-traumatic osteoarthritis (PTOA). This condition affects roughly one-fifth of the 650 million people worldwide with osteoarthritis. Using a human tissue chip model on the International Space Station, the ISS researchers observed…

In 2023, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) issued guidelines advising patients to discontinue GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP1-RAs) a week before surgery, citing concerns over potential operative complications, leading to delayed or rescheduled surgeries across the U.S. Dr. David Klonoff, a diabetes researcher and Endocrinologist at Mill Peninsula Medical Center, thought it was curious that…

  Sponsored by Diversigen, Inc. Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR) — also known as real-time PCR — is a molecular biology lab assay technique based on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The significant difference in qPCR is the monitoring of amplification on a targeted gene or taxon during the PCR. This allows qPCR to be…

NVIDIA is putting the power of generative AI for drug discovery into the hands of more pharmaceutical and biotech companies with an expanded collection of AI models and flexible deployment options. More than 100 firms are already using the company’s biomolecular BioNeMo platform to accelerate the development of therapeutics. “For the first time in history,…

Using generative AI in drug discovery, Iambic Therapeutics (formerly Entos) has advanced its IAM1363 drug candidate from program launch to clinical studies in fewer than 24 months — a process that often takes several years. Iambic Therapeutics’ AI drug development milestone relied on an alliance with NVIDIA researchers and engineers and through the use of…

A once-controversial psychedelic substance could potentially be a promising treatment for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). That’s the view of Dr. Rakesh Jain, a psychiatrist with extensive experience in clinical practice, research, and education, affiliated with Texas Tech University School of Medicine. Jain expressed optimism in LSD-based therapy while acknowledging the challenges inherent in such a…

Rare diseases may seem niche, but their impact is far from small. An estimated 7,000 rare diseases exist, collectively affecting a 300 million people worldwide.  This immense burden of disease, coupled with a profound lack of treatment options, underscores the urgent need for innovation. “Actually, the total burden of disease and unmet medical need [for…

In the Aesopian fable, the tortoise’s steady focus and persistence overcomes the hare’s bursts of speed. 2023 saw a similar shift in the pharma sector. While Pfizer, thanks to blockbuster COVID vaccine sales, rocketed to unprecedented heights in 2022 surpassing $100 billion in revenue, its fortunes reversed in 2023. As COVID product demand plummeted, Pfizer’s…

eClinical’s Industry Outlook 2024 report highlights a significant acceleration in AI/ML adoption for clinical trials. Over half of professionals (53%) in functions like clinical operations, data management, and biometrics now see these technologies as central to streamlining trials by 2024, surpassing the emphasis on automation that dominated last year. Despite this hype cycle, a core…

Oncology may continue be one of the hottest sectors across the pharma sector, but other therapeutic areas are catching up in terms of innovation and investment. While oncology and hematology jointly accounted for about one-third of the new FDA approvals in 2023, investors are increasingly betting on precision medicine, advanced drug delivery systems and the use of…

In a crowded migraine treatment landscape, AbbVie is aiming to differentiate itself by redefining migraine treatment beyond just counting headache days and other traditional clinical endpoints. At the European Headache Congress (EHC), the company touted its patient-centered approach in evaluating quality of life, daily functioning, rapid relief, and balanced benefit-risk profiles, while aiming to continue…

Two out of three pharma companies (67%) plan to ramp up investment in IT, including AI, over the next 12 months, according to a survey from the cloud vendor Rackspace Technology and Dell/VMware conducted in October 2023. About the same amount, 68%, reported challenges in recruiting and hiring talent skilled in cloud and AI technology.…

After only two doses, nearly eight out of ten participants in a phase 2 trial experienced remission from major depressive disorder (MDD) at six weeks, highlighting the potential of Cybin’s deuterated psilocybin analog, CYB003. In 2021, an estimated 21.0 million adults in the United States had at least one major depressive episode, representing 8.3% of…

The tale of digital pharma and biotech in 2023 is one of two realities. In one corner, you have AI and digital-focused startups and sometimes executives at Big Pharma companies with grand AI ambitions proclaiming the power of the technology. But on the other side of the pharma-AI coin is a more cautious crowd. Here,…

In the phase 3 SURMOUNT-3 trial, tirzepatide recipients saw some of the most impressive weight loss results among trials of GLP-1 drugs, including most notably semaglutide. In the study, participants’ total mean weight loss was 26.6% over 84 weeks following a 12-week intensive lifestyle intervention and subsequent tirzepatide treatment. In all, participants who received tirzepatide…

 Data sourced from Our World in Data Cardiovascular disease and cancer remain the leading causes of death in the world, based on an analysis of data sources ranging from World Health Organization and Our World in Data. While respiratory illnesses were the third most common cause of death in 2019, deaths in this category…

Much of the world is grappling with a mental health crisis — with soaring rates of depression and anxiety. Last year, the startup Gate Neurosciences emerged with a novel approach. While the Carmel, Indiana–based company is focused on synaptic plasticity like many other contemporary CNS companies, it diverges in its strategy. Rather than using a…

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…

Johns Hopkins researchers have made strides in a study focusing on multiple sclerosis. By applying microparticles to activate regulatory T cells, they were able to reverse MS-like symptoms in mice. There is no cure for multiple sclerosis (MS). But a recent study by Johns Hopkins Medicine shows encouraging progress towards: They have demonstrated the ability…

Drug development involves many rounds of regulatory approval and oversight, including multiple stages of regulatory submissions. In the U.S., these include the Investigational New Drug Application (IND) before clinical trials in humans, the New Drug Application (NDA) or Biologics License Application (BLA), prior to commercial sale and Annual Product Quality Reviews (APQR) to monitor ongoing…

In a recent conversation with Dr. Andy Beck, co-founder and CEO of PathAI, we had the opportunity to discuss PathExplore, an AI-driven platform that aims to transform the way tumor microenvironment (TME) analysis is conducted. Traditional methods such as manual pathology, multiplex immunofluorescence and single-cell omics often face limitations, including high costs or tissue consumption.…

During Nvidia’s (Nasdaq:NVDA) GTC event, the company introduced BioNeMo Cloud, a new component to their AI Foundations suite. This service, designed to streamline life sciences research, drug discovery and protein engineering, provides researchers with access to pretrained AI models, allowing for customization with proprietary data. Offered as a cloud service, BioNeMo Cloud enables accelerated drug…