Amid a backdrop of recent RSV vaccine approvals, GSK and Pfizer find themselves locked in a legal spat over alleged patent infringements. Both Big Pharma giants now possess the FDA’s blessing for their respective respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines. Pfizer’s recent win came with the second approval for its Abrysvo vaccine, which the company now…

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…

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 a strong emphasis on AI in clinical trials optimization. Specifically, eClinical Solutions taps AI/ML…

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…

Minneapolis-based Flywheel has received $54 million in a Series D round backed by NVIDIA, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and other strategic investors. Flywheel will invest the cash to fuel growth in core verticals, the pharmaceutical and public sector healthcare sectors. A notable Big Pharma customer is Genentech. The company also aims to ramp up expansion…

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…

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…

In an era of rapid AI progress, the quest to pioneer the first AI-developed drug candidates has led to an increasing number of these drug candidates entering clinical trials. One contender is ulotaront, an antipsychotic drug, that fared well in a phase 3 schizophrenia study published in NEJM in 2020. Sunovion discovered the drug in…

Along with predictive AI, generative AI is emerging as a promising tool in drug discovery. Thanks in part to the rise of ChatGPT, interest in the technology in drug discovery is on the upswing. In March, a preprint appeared examining the potential to use generative AI to enable de novo antibody design. Also this year,…

The pharma industry is embracing artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline drug discovery and development, although adoption remains early. The field, however, is rapidly expanding. The global AI in drug discovery market was worth about $1.1 billion last year but could grow at a 30% clip from 2023 to 2030, according to Grand View Research.  In…

Scientists have long been perceived and portrayed in film as old people in white lab coats perched at a bench full of bubbling fluorescent liquids. The present-day reality of scientific research is quite different from old stereotypes, with AI-driven scientific breakthroughs emerging as a major driving force behind new discoveries. Scientists are increasingly data jockeys…

Neurodegenerative disease research is witnessing significant advances. To that end, Hong Kong-headquartered Aprinoia Therapeutics is embracing a ‘precision neuroscience’ approach to neurodegeneration diagnostics. The company’s lead program, APN-1607, represents a new generation of advanced tau positron emission tomography (PET) tracers, which play a crucial role in effective and efficient diagnosis of patients suffering from neurodegenerative…

Early in my career, my manager used the phrase in the above headline to highlight the difficulty inherent in drug discovery. Over the ensuing years, I have seen that statement repeatedly confirmed by the brutal attrition in the discovery and development of new drugs. There are so many variables that can kill a drug discovery…

It’s been said that data is the new oil, something pharma researchers understand well. The phrase hits especially close to home for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers who work heavily with medical images. Medical imaging is a powerful diagnostic tool in the drug development process, as it can provide the efficacy and safety monitoring required in…

Big Pharma’s ability to innovate has grown in recent years, and the industry’s increasing reliance on data could help it sustain momentum in the future. While McKinsey notes that the industry has been relatively slow in adopting technologies such as AI and automation, the industry is growing more tech-savvy. “The acceptance of data is picking up across…

The pandemic exposed the innovation divide between the digitally transformed and those that lagged. Strict regulation made life sciences and bio/pharma organizations hesitant to modernize too quickly away from proven legacy methods and technologies, resulting in varying levels of digital transformation. But since the pandemic, organizations now recognize the necessity of digitalization and smart automation…

In any area of disease research, a deep understanding of recent and future trends surrounding a particular condition is crucial to the drug discovery process. But with the volume of scientific literature increasing all the time, it is difficult to manually sift through all the existing information and correlate data in such a way to…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the racioethnic and socioeconomic disparities inherent in the U.S. healthcare system. These disparities take the form of increased adverse health outcomes and reduced quality of life for affected groups. For example, a study of cities that reported COVID-19 deaths by race and ethnicity found that 34% of…

The pharma industry has been slower to embrace technologies such as AI and digital technology than many less-regulated sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the equation, forcing pharma companies to become more agile and open-minded in approaching drug discovery and development, including managing evolving clinical trials. In this article, several experts offered their predictions of…

While drug developers continue to develop promising investigational cancer drugs, conducting clinical research in oncology remains difficult. Here’s how AI-enabled software can help.  The statistics on inadequate trial recruitment and endemic challenges in oncology clinical trials are well known. They have only gotten worse over the past 20 years. While the number of cancer treatments…

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to fundamental changes in how pharmaceutical companies and physicians interact with patients. And yet — for all of the talk about digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI) and decentralized clinical trials in medicine in recent years — the adoption of those concepts has lagged. “The reality is that we’ve gone after…

As clinical trials have become more decentralized, there has been an increased focus on the need for more patient-centric drug development. This focus has led to a variety of eClinical applications. Electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) and other electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) approaches can transform trials to make them more pragmatic, patient-centric and efficient. Such…

For all of its promise in healthcare and elsewhere, deploying artificial intelligence is frequently a challenging endeavor. “Close collaboration between data science teams, other project team members and stakeholders is essential,” said Jennifer Bradford, director of data science at Phastar, the London-headquartered contract research organization. While input from computational, statistical or medical experts could be…

Researchers at privately-held Genuity Science and Yale University Medical School have revealed why aortic aneurysms form. The scientists discovered that an expansion in abnormal cells in smooth muscle tissue of the aorta can contribute to aortic aneurysm. The researchers came to that conclusion by using a combination of generative artificial intelligence, single-cell biology and RNA sequencing to…

Researchers at Purdue University have devised chemical reactivity flowcharts and novel machine learning models that could accelerate drug discovery. Although the use of machine learning for drug development has grown, researchers’ ability to understand machine learning recommendations has been limited. In a paper published in Organic Letters, Purdue professor Gaurav Chopra noted that the machine…