Balancing on a tightrope, pharma’s generative AI journey straddles fear and FOMO

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Pharma and biotech companies have had a spectrum of responses to the surge in generative artificial intelligence (AI). A recent Washington Post article describes an unnamed biotech firm that banned employees from using OpenAI’s ChatGPT despite its capability to bolster productivity given concerns over potential data leaks. At the same time, the burgeoning AI landscape have created a fear of missing out, or FOMO, among businesses, including the pharma sector. “There’s this fear of missing out that I think is driving everybody to do something,” said Scott Snyder, chief digital officer at Eversana. On a tightrope of fear and FOMO, the pharmaceutical industry’s journey with generative AI continues with some companies taking more of a wait-and-see approach and others forging ahead with the technology to, for instance, discovery novel compounds.

Eversana is among those that ar…

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Eversana partners with AWS to accelerate generative AI in pharma

Life sciences commercial services company Eversana is one of the latest to throw its hat into the generative AI ring. Tapping a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Everasana is focusing on developing generative AI technologies in the pharmaceutical industry.

Also this month, the startup Synthetica Bio announced it would use generative AI to boost drug discovery innovation while Nvidia announced it would invest $50 million in the biotech Recursion to support its AI drug discovery efforts. Earlier this year, Nvidia debuted a cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery known as BioNemo.

Eversana’s approach to generative AI in pharma

Eversana aims to ‘pharmatise’ AI. The company’s chief digital officer Scott Snyder explains: “When we talk about pharmatising, it’s overlaying all of the unique needs, requirements, and goals of pharma, but layering it on to the innovation capability of generative AI.”…

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Synthetica Bio lates to tap generative AI to spur drug discovery innovation

Interest in generative AI has skyrocketed in 2023. While the generative AI market is already substantial, worth $10 billion in 2022 according to Grand View Research, it is set to balloon by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.6% from 2023 to 2030.  It’s no wonder that a slew of companies — including Exscientia, Insilico Medicine, Atomwise and BenevolentAI — are eager to tap the technology to expedite drug discovery.

Enter Synthetica Bio

The latest entrant in the generative AI scene is Laguna Beach, California-based Synthetica Bio. The startup aims to explore generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to enable real-time data processing. The company, founded by Simon Arkell and Alex Dickinson, entrepreneurs with a successful track record in companies like the predictive analytics firm Predixion, digital pathology startup Deep Lens, biotech Helixis and the molecular diagnostics firm Chromacode, has formed strategic partnerships to propel its platform de…

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Raising the efficiency floor and innovation ceiling with generative AI in drug discovery

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Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT promise advances that extend beyond capturing public interest. Because transformer models like GPT have an architecture that supports the understanding of language in context, they point to an array of novel possibilities for scientific research. “The transformer architecture is critical,” according to Michael Connell, the chief operating officer at Enthought. In a recent interview, Connell provided a sense of what to expect from generative AI in drug discovery, touching on how these tools could automate mundane tasks, streamline complex scientific workflows and speed drug discovery.

The promises and pitfalls of generative AI in drug discovery

In scientific research, generative AI, of which LLMs are an example, can partly automate tasks such as summarizing academic papers, solving math problems, coding, ensuring qual…

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A deep dive into AWS’s strategy with generative AI and ML in life sciences

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The AI market is witnessing meteoric growth, with projections hinting at a potentially staggering increase over the next decade. Against this backdrop of rapid AI evolution, we recently spoke with Tehsin Syed, general manager of AWS Health. Syed shared that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seeing growing interest from Big Pharma firms. “Nine of the top 10 pharma companies in the world have a large majority of the workloads running on AWS,” Syed said. The AWS cloud hosts more than 100,000 customers across industries.

AWS aims to provide a broad and deep range of AI services and takes an end-to-end approach to AI that includes infrastructure, software, hardware and services.In an increasingly competitive AI landscape, AWS recently launched a $100 million initiative, the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, to accelerate enterprise generative AI adoption. As Syed put it, “AWS has a pe…

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Generative AI could boost biopharma R&D productivity by billions, according to McKinsey

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Generative AI stands to add trillions of dollars of value to the world economy, according to a recent McKinsey report. The consultancy noted that about three-quarters of the value of generative AI spans four areas — customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering and R&D. The latter could see a 12% annual lift in global functional spending as a result of generative AI, representing an approximately $328 billion windfall annually.

An evolution or revolution: UBS and McKinsey’s take on generative AI in biopharma

The investment bank UBS recently reached more muted conclusions, noting that generative AI would represent more of an evolution than a revolution for biopharma.

Conversely, McKinsey bets the technology could deliver productivity gains that account for 10% to 15% of overall R&D costs. This potential largely stems from the applicatio…

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Google Cloud partners with Mayo Clinic on generative AI

Google Cloud and Mayo Clinic will team up on generative AI for healthcare, the two organizations said today.

They intend to develop new capabilities for healthcare organizations to increase productivity, automate repetitive tasks and make administrative processes more efficient. Mayo Clinic and Google Cloud said they are also working with several unidentified healthcare organizations through this partnership.

Previously: The cloud is transforming medtech: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, J&J, Philips and GE Healthcare leaders explain

Mayo Clinic is already using Google Cloud’s Enterprise Search in Gen App Builder and looking for ways that search and generative AI can retrieve information more efficiently and effectively from healthcare records, research papers and clinical guidelines across a variety of formats and locations.

“Our prioritization of patient safety, privacy, and ethical considerations, means that generative AI can have a s…

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UBS: Generative AI is no silver bullet for drug discovery

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Imagine a world where the process of developing life-saving drugs is as streamlined as a modern assembly line.

In such a reality, generative AI in drug discovery might churn out promising compounds with similar efficiency and precision as a factory robot assembling a car. Moreover, such technology could chip away at the steep cost and lengthy timelines typically associated with drug development, which can cost north of $2 billion and take more than a decade.

However, such a vision may be more hype than reality, according to a new UBS report. While it is true that AI is carving out a niche in life sciences, a recent Q-Series report from UBS titled “Will Generative AI deliver a generational transformation?” reaches mostly muted conclusions about the potential of generative AI in drug development. In essence, the investment bank projects that generative AI…

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Navigating generative AI in drug discovery and data analysis: Seizing the opportunity and avoiding pitfalls

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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 Japanese conglomerate Mitsui & Co. began working with NVIDIA to launch Tokyo-1, a project aimed at boosting Japan’s pharma industry with generative AI models. The initiative will give Japanese pharma companies and startups access to an NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer, providing a shot in the arm to the country’s $100 billion pharma sector, which is the third largest globally.

As generative AI gains ground in  pharma, businesses considering using the technology to speed up drug discovery should also take its potential drawbacks into considering. To that end, Ali Arsanjan…

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The ‘Iron man suit’ for QA Managers: Quality management software taps power of ChatGPT

Gone are the days when Microsoft’s animated paperclip, Clippy, popped up on your screen with helpful — and sometimes annoying — tips and tricks for your Word document. Now, the Israeli eQMS compliance provider Dot Compliance has launched what it hails as an industry-first electronic Quality Management System (eQMS) for life sciences with a prominent generative AI-enhanced digital assistant that could take intelligent assistance to new heights. “It’s not just ChatGPT. It’s many other algorithms that are evolving,” said Doron Sitbon, founder and CEO of the company.

Transforming quality assurance with AI-driven quality management software

Rather than Clippy, Sitbon uses another metaphor to illustrate the company’s ChatGPT-enhanced “Dottie” capabilities for its QMS Xpress quality management software. “I think of it as an Iron Man suit for a [quality assurance] manager,” Sitbon quipped. The Dottie digital assistan…

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Nvidia launches BioNeMo Cloud as a breakthrough AI service for drug discovery research

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During Nvidia’s (Nasdaq:NVDA) GTC event, the company introduced BioNeMo Cloud, a new component to their AI Foundations suite. This service, designed to streamline life sciences research, drug discovery and protein engineering, provides researchers with access to pretrained AI models, allowing for customization with proprietary data. Offered as a cloud service, BioNeMo Cloud enables accelerated drug discovery workflows, with multinational biotech company Amgen (Nasdaq:AMGN) and several startups already utilizing the platform.

BioNeMo Cloud features pretrained AI models for molecular biology, chemistry and molecular dynamics. The platform allows researchers to fine-tune models with proprietary data, executing AI model inference via web browsers or new cloud APIs. This accelerates drug discovery, molecular identification and protein 3D structure prediction.

Featured models in…

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