artificial intelligence

After kickstarting the GLP-1 wave that transformed the pharma landscape and briefly sending its market value above Denmark’s annual economic output, Novo Nordisk now trades about 5% below where its shares stood five years ago. After its shares hit an all-time closing high of $137.40 on June 25, 2024, the stock slid about 66% to…

For the past several years, success has grown more elusive for American biotech firms. Even in the more robust investment climates prior to 2022, developing and growing a biotech always required a combination of risk appetite and patient capital that did not lend itself to the rapid exits typical of other areas of tech investing. …

For years, many small-molecule teams have treated comprehensive Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism and Excretion (ADME) profiling as a lead-optimization step. That is, it serves as a place to spend heavily once a lead series has already emerged. Now, Ginkgo Datapoints, Tangible Scientific and Inductive Bio are betting that AI, automation and tighter compound logistics can move…

Immunai, a startup building a foundation model of the human immune system, has expanded its oncology collaboration with AstraZeneca for the third time. Immunai is eligible to receive up to $37.5 million over 2026 and 2027 under the new agreement, which extends its AMICA-OS platform deeper into AstraZeneca’s clinical development pipeline. The two companies began…

Cellular Intelligence has acquired global rights to a clinical-stage Parkinson’s cell therapy, from Novo Nordisk, which took an equity stake in the startup and retained milestone and royalty rights. Cellular Intelligence, formerly Somite AI, has raised over $60 million from Khosla Ventures, AMD Ventures, CZI, SciFi VC and others to build foundation models that predict…

Amazon Web Services today launched Amazon Bio Discovery, an application that routes AI-designed antibody candidates directly to DNA Synthesis firm Twist Bioscience and the techbio Ginkgo Bioworks for synthesis and testing, with results flowing back into the same interface that generated them. AWS launched Amazon Bio Discovery with Bayer, the Broad Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering…

In 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that a single entrepreneur using AI would generate a business worth more than one billion dollars. The L.A. entrepreneur Matthew Gallagher apparently is boasting that his telehealth startup MEDVi is among the first companies to make good on that prediction. On LinkedIn, he has called the firm, which…

In traditional drug discovery, typical timelines for successful drugs stretch from 10 to 14 years, or sometimes even longer to bring a drug from discovery to approval. In addition to that, the cost of bringing a drug to market can range from hundreds of millions to multiple billions of dollars. In fact, the inflation-adjusted cost…

It turns out that AI really is doing the work. At least a growing chunk of it. Artificial intelligence is spreading through the global workforce like wildfire, dwarfing the adoption pace of the internet, with a new Anthropic report citing Gallup research that 40% of U.S. employees now use AI at work. While the field…

In recent years, the clinical research landscape has been marked by a steady rise in protocol complexity with more endpoints and procedures across all trial phases and therapeutic areas. This trend, driven by the increasing sophistication of trial designs, is evident across trial phases and major therapeutic areas. Resulting in more endpoints and procedures on…

Building on existing integrations with cloud leaders AWS and Google Cloud and collaborations with Arcadia and TD2, Atropos Health is now partnering with Merck. This new collaboration will tap Atropos Health’s GENEVA OS (Generative Evidence Acceleration Operating System) and related tools with the aim of speeding the generation of real-world evidence. Under the agreement, Merck’s…

The global AI drug discovery market, valued around $1 to $1.7 billion in 2023, will be worth a multiple of that by the decade’s end. Analysts project the sector could be worth $9 billion or more. 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Recipients: David Baker Demis Hassabis John Jumper Achievement: Computational protein design and structure prediction…

In 2024, we saw the expanded use of synthetic data and natural language processing transform drug discovery and development. In a batch of predictions published in December of 2023, one expert predicted that synthetic data was set to “take off” in drug research. In 2025, the pendulum could begin swinging back the other way, according…

As a journalist interested in decoding AI and its impact on the research landscape, I recently took Insilico Medicine’s DORA (Draft Outline Research Assistant) for a test drive, a new platform summarized here. DORA, a specialized agentic-based tool aims to draft scientific content while promising to slash the time and effort required to produce first…

The pandemic, the rise of decentralized trials and a wave of technological advances have each played a role in reshaping clinical trials and safety reporting. While these events have been changing the industry, the internet’s growing convenience and accessibility has also empowered and transformed the patient experience. Patients are increasingly turning to online platforms, particularly…

As pharma giants like Darmstadt, Germany–based Merck KGaA announce new pacts with AI companies, the drug development landscape is witnessing a familiar pattern of emerging tech adoption. AI’s promise of faster, more efficient drug discovery has captured the industry’s imagination, leading Big Pharma to ramp up investment in AI startups and partnerships. Yet, the technology’s…

In this age of rapidly evolving technologies that fundamentally shift the way businesses operate, such as large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP), organizations are quickly realizing that success extends beyond innovative technology solutions alone. While these technologies offer immense potential in terms of innovation, data insights and operational efficiency gains, constraints exist…

As machine learning and deep learning technologies advance thanks to advances in computation, algorithms and data availability, the possibilities of the technology continue to expand in medicine. While these AI-driven approaches have real potential, such systems demand large volumes of representative data, careful privacy and security scrutiny and thoughtful long-term strategic planning. In this Q&A, Kathryn…

Only 12% of new drug candidates that enter phase 1 clinical development ultimately receive FDA approval. This dismal success rate leaves millions of patients with unmet medical needs and drives up the costs for the small number of drugs that make it to market. More frustratingly, it leaves untold numbers of potentially transformative therapies back-burnered…

In an AI hype-filled biopharma industry, one company is taking a back-to-basics yet supercomputer-powered approach — using Bayesian analysis on massive patient datasets to guide drug discovery. The company crunches trillions of data points per patient. “It’s massive, which is why we use a supercomputer,” said Niven R. Narain, Ph.D., BPGbio CEO. The company has…

Repurposing is a drug development strategy that has been widely applied in cancer. This strategy, sometimes called label expansion, involves obtaining FDA approval to market a drug for the treatment of new indications, alone or in combination with other drugs. Not only can this approach extend the window of patent protection for a commercialized drug,…

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.…

In a year or two, the clinical trial industry may move beyond electronic data capture (EDC), a technology that has been the cornerstone of clinical data management for decades, projects Raj Indupuri, CEO of eClinical Solutions. Given the potential of electronic medical records (EMR) to feed directly into data infrastructure, the need for EDC may…

In the midst of a global pandemic, Pfizer, under the leadership of its chief digital and technology officer Lidia Fonseca, achieved what was once thought impossible. The company, with the partnership of BioNTech, developed a COVID-19 vaccine in only 269 days, a process that traditionally would have taken 8 to 10 years. While prior research…

The entry of AI into healthcare is starkly different from the accepted adage of “move fast and break things” in consumerism. In episode 1 of AI Meets Life Sci, Kayleen Brown, managing editor at DeviceTalks, and Brian Buntz, pharma and biotech editor, discuss the opportunities, limitations, and direct impact of Ai in healthcare fields including…