By Maggie Fick and Michael Erman
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 26 (Reuters) – Artificial intelligence has yet to deliver on the most challenging aspect of drug development — finding new molecules that lead to major medical advances — but it is already streamlining less glamorous parts of the process, industry executives say.
AI is helping find participants and sites for clinical trials and drafting documents for regulators, shaving weeks off these labor-intensive processes, seven large drugmakers and six smaller biotech companies said at the recent JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.
It can take a decade and $2 billion to bring a new drug to market, pharmaceutical companies say. Many, including Eli Lilly, which has partnered with leading chipmaker Nvidia, are betting AI can also improve the success rate of new drugs.
Drug companies have announced a slew of deals for tools to unleash the promise of AI, seen as the biggest technological upheaval since the internet, much as other industries are doing.
Agentic AI – or AI that is autonomous requiring little human intervention – could increase clinical development productivity by about 35% to 45% over the next five years, consultancy McKinsey predicted last year.
Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries said it is utilizing AI in multiple ways so it can focus on the big picture goal of successfully bringing new drugs to market.
“Everything else that’s around that needs to be as efficient and as small as possible,” Teva CEO Richard Francis said. “This is where I think AI digitization, modernization, process improvement, all the unsexy stuff that we get actually quite excited about, makes a difference.”
THOUSANDS OF DOCUMENTS
Executives from global pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca, Roche and Pfizer, as well as smaller biotechs like Spyre and Nuvalent, described tracking thousands of pages of documents for regulators, including clinical, safety and manufacturing records.
The documents must be compiled, cross-checked and kept consistent across geographies, often requiring the costly use of outside contractors, AstraZeneca Chief Financial Officer Aradhana Sarin explained.
Jorge Conde, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is investing in fixes to what he calls drug development’s “messy middle,” including putting $4.3 million into startup Alleviate Health.
He described trial enrollment as a “leaky funnel” in which participants drop out along the way, and sees Alleviate using AI technology to help with patient outreach, education, screening and scheduling.
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