AI in drug development Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

AWS-NVIDIA gen-AI alliance epitomizes Big Tech’s growing interest in drug discovery

Highlighting the complexity of proteins, this 3D structure shows rhodopsin, a protein crucial for vision. [Adobe Stock]

The allure of healthcare has long captivated Big Tech giants. Over the past fifteen years or so, several prominent companies in the sector have ventured into the life sciences sector with ambitious projects, only to often find themselves retreating.

The dynamic appears to be changing, particularly in drug discovery, thanks in part to burgeoning data science maturity, the runaway success of generative AI (gen-AI), growing appetite for the cloud across healthcare and continued computational breakthroughs.

Tech companies are also realizing the diversity and uniqueness of healthcare data. “In less than a decade, [healthcare] will become the largest data generation industry,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president and general manager of healthcare at NVIDIA. “That’s one reason why large t…

NVIDIA and AWS collaborate to bring BioNeMo AI platform to the cloud

3D protein structure prediction with AlphaFold2, OpenFold, and ESMFold in NVIDIA’s BioNeMo. [NVIDIA]

Chipmaker NVIDIA and cloud behemoth AWS have been partnering for years, and now the two companies are announcing that NVIDIA’s drug discovery generative AI platform, BioNeMo, is now available on AWS. Additionally, plans are underway for BioNeMo to be offered on AWS on NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

The alliance was announced at the AWS re:Invent event. Startups including Evozyne, Etcembly and Alchemab are early AWS users using BioNeMo for generative AI-accelerated drug discovery and development.

Evozyne focuses on creating novel proteins for therapeutic development, Etcembly is building a large machine learning database for immunology and TCR immunotherapies, and Alchemab specializes in identifying protective antibodies for hard-to-treat diseases.

Last week, NVIDIA announced a collaboration with Genentech with BioNeMo also playing a ke…

AI in drug development: Janssen exploring potential of AI in everything from target discovery to clinical trials

As enterprise AI adoption surges, the life science industry stands at a pivotal juncture. “We are truly at a tipping point,” remarked Najat Khan, chief data science officer at Janssen, during the 2023 Stanford Drug Discovery Symposium. “It’s amazing how quickly we’ve been able to make progress across the whole value chain in terms of drug development,” she said. “The reality is that there’s a lot of hype, but there is already a lot that’s happening.”

While most Big Pharma companies are exploring AI applications, as a 2022 Clinical Trials Arena article noted. It’s easy to understand why. While developing a given drug might take more than a decade, AI could potentially enable the development of “drugs in one-tenth of the time, from being discovered to being able to treat patients,” wrote McKinsey partner Alex Deverson in late 2022.

Janssen is aiming to distinguish itself by building a team of “bilingual”…