Three ways AI is speeding up drug discovery

Around 90 percent of the world’s large pharmaceutical companies have been working on projects involving AI since 2020. The key benefit of AI and predictive algorithms is to enable the analysis of much larger data sets, speeding up research and therefore bringing new drugs to market faster.

Here we take a look at the three latest investments big pharma has made in AI.

Bristol Myers Squibb invests in AI for clinical trials

Bristol Myers Squibb has made a significant investment in the use of AI to enhance clinical trials, initially in cardiovascular disease, with the potential to expand into other therapeutic areas. 

Collaborating with biotech startup Owkin, the American firm plans to use AI to optimize the design of clinical trials while reducing their cost.

Using Owkin’s AI technology, data will be captured from a network of academic medical centers, applying state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to determine patient subgroups and the efficacy of treatments.

Venkat Sethuraman, Senior Vice President for Global Biometrics and Data Sciences at Bristol Myers Squibb, said: “In particular, cardiovascular disease is an area of significant unmet need, where we have the opportunity to use technology in new ways to further accelerate potential breakthroughs for patients who are waiting.”  

Janssen develops AI biomarker for bladder cancer

Janssen has developed a biomarker test to predict the presence of certain actionable alterations in the genes of patients with bladder cancer.

Working with tech company Paige, Janssen will deploy the AI-powered biomarker to detect alterations in the fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) genes, with the aim of better tailoring patients' treatment plans and facilitating clinical trial recruitment.

The tool will provide routine biopsy results in the form of digitized images in less than one hour and is compatible with existing digital pathology solutions, including widely used scanners, monitors, and laboratory information systems (LIS).

With this new screening tool, Janssen hopes to increase rates of molecular testing and improve the recruitment of suitable patients into biomarker-driven clinical trials.

PharmaIQ Live: Transforming Drug Discovery through AI

It is a commonly quoted statistic that the average cost to bring a new drug to market is 2.6bn, and that only 10% of drug candidates make it to market after phase 1 trials. Given its potential to spot patterns that would take researches significantly longer to do, Artificial Intelligence has the potential to both accelerate and reduce the cost of discovering new drugs.

Sign up for this webinar to learn more about:

• Target identification – combing existing data to identify potential drug targets
• Compounds – identifying existing compounds that might prove useful, ruling out those with undesirable characteristics and predicting the properties of potential compounds
• Data integration – effectively integrating data from disparate sources such as patient data, research papers to identify patterns and opportunities

Learn More

Sanofi launches ‘digital accelerator’ for new drug candidates

Sanofi has launched a ‘digital accelerator’ that will deploy AI in the development of 15 new drug candidates to target cancers and other immune system diseases.

The project is part of Sanofi’s wider digital transformation program which includes digitizing manufacturing processes, improving supply chain performance by using predictive models and accelerating the discovery of new targets with AI.  

The digital accelerator’s first area of focus is developing a data solution for patients with atopic dermatitis who are living in France, Italy and Spain.  

Sanofi is also using AI in the field of digital toxicology, to predict potential adverse effects of different drugs earlier in the discovery life cycle. One particular achievement has been predicting phototoxicity, by creating a computer model that has been able to identify how risky a compound is when it interacts with UV light and could potentially cause sunburn and skin irritation.

Arnaud Robert, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Sanofi, commented: “Sanofi’s digital transformation is driven by a business and cultural shift as much as it is by technology. The Digital Accelerator will help us democratize the use of data, develop an agile mindset across the company, and accelerate innovation for patients and healthcare professionals – at speed and scale.”

Quick links:

• How Sanofi is using AI to accelerate time to market for new drugs
• Watch: Transforming drug discovery through artificial intelligence 
• Why R&D must digitalize and become data-centric

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