personalized medicine Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

Genentech’s lab in the loop aims to tap the power of quantity for quality drug discovery

[NVIDIA]

We can design chips that power self-driving cars and create physically-realistic video footage based on text descriptions. Yet, as Genentech’s Aviv Regev pointed out in a session about the company’s lab in the loop at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, the humble cells within us operate with a complexity that still eludes our full understanding.

It turns out that a cell is itself like a computational device with circuits and code, Regev said. These molecular “circuits” interact with each other, receive information, make decisions, and execute them. “These molecular circuits — they’re hard to reverse engineer,” she said. That hasn’t stopped scientists from spending decades trying to model and predict their behavior. “Mostly unsuccessfully, I can tell you,” Regev added.

But what if we could harness the same technological power driving those other breakthroughs to unravel t…

Devices, disease, and digital: Holy Grail of healthcare AI

[Image courtesy of GE HealthCare]

In episode 3 of AI Meets Life Sci, DeviceTalks Managing Editor Kayleen Brown and Pharma and Biotech Editor Brian Buntz sit down with GE HealthCare Chief Digital Officer and GM of Oncology Ben Newton and Haley Schwartz of Catalyze Healthcare to discuss the impacts of AI to screen, diagnose, prognose, and treat cure disease while addressing real-world implementation issues from regulation and liability to clinician trust and adoption. They review the AI challenge of organizing disarrayed informational islands such as technology, clinical protocols, and digital solutions into cohesive, well-developed systems and offer insight into the medtech industry’s progress in this area.

Tune in and subscribe to AI Meets Life Sci on all major podcast channels and follow youtube.com/@DeviceTalks or AI Meets Life Sci YouTube Podcast to ensure you never miss an episode.

The AI Holy Grail for …

Devices, disease, and digital: Holy Grail of healthcare AI

[Image courtesy of GE HealthCare]

In episode 3 of AI Meets Life Sci, DeviceTalks Managing Editor Kayleen Brown and Pharma and Biotech Editor Brian Buntz sit down with GE HealthCare Chief Digital Officer and GM of Oncology Ben Newton and Haley Schwartz of Catalyze Healthcare to discuss the impacts of AI to screen, diagnose, prognose, and treat cure disease while addressing real-world implementation issues from regulation and liability to clinician trust and adoption.

They review the AI challenge of organizing disarrayed informational islands such as technology, clinical protocols, and digital solutions into cohesive, well-developed systems and offer insight into the medtech industry’s progress in this area.

The AI Holy Grail for decision support

Ben Newton

AI technologies emerged quickly over the last several years in medical imaging and oncology…

Biden names 31 tech hubs: Here are 10 relevant to pharma and biotech

[Gorodenkoff/Adobe Stock]

Traditionally, the tech and biotech sectors in the U.S. have been concentrated in a handful of regions — most notably in areas such as Boston, Seattle, Silicon Valley and Southern California. But the Biden administration aims to distribute innovation more evenly through the U.S. To that end, the administration has designated 31 tech hubs across the U.S. to help drive innovation and job creation in a variety of industries.

These tech hubs are part of a competitive program involving $500 million in federal funding, with each hub eligible to apply for $50–$75 million to drive innovation in their respective focus areas. Here, we highlight 10 hubs that are especially relevant to the pharma and biotech sectors, describing their unique focus areas.

Three of the regions were featured in an earlier Drug Discovery & Development roundup on emerging biotech hubs: Baltimore, Maryland; Mad…

CGT demands vision, partnership and patient-centricity to transform healthcare

[catalin/Adobe Stock]

As personalized medicine continues to progress, cell and gene therapy (CGT) development is poised to enable tremendous medical breakthroughs. Unlike traditional treatments which merely manage symptoms, CGT could treat the root biological cause of many diseases: the faulty genes.

“The cell and gene therapy space is truly exciting. What this ultimately means for patients and caregivers, and our ability to play an important part within this paradigm, is exhilarating,” said Dr. Panteli Theocharous, the global vice president and cell and gene therapy strategy lead at PPD.

With more than 20 years of experience in the pharma and biotech industries, Theocharous provides guidance on developing CGTs. He accentuates the importance of partnerships, data-driven approaches and patient-centricity in overcoming challenges.

Yet the path forward is filled with obstacles. In 2021, cell and gene …

Sanofi bets on AI-powered decision making

Unveiling Sanofi’s AI-powered pharma strategy, the French pharma giant announced its plans to tap AI for insights across the company. With “plai,” an internal app, AI is utilized to provide real-time data supporting decision-making.

Sanofi’s goal, as CEO Paul Hudson stated in a news release, is to become the first pharma company powered by AI at scale, “giving our people tools to make better everyday decisions.”

How Sanofi’s AI-powered pharma strategy compares to other industry moves

Several other companies have initiated similar AI-powered moves over the years. For instance, in December 2016, Pfizer and IBM inked a deal to use IBM Watson for drug discovery in immuno-oncology. Roche has explored using machine learning for diabetes diagnostics while companies like Novartis have advertised hundreds of AI hires in recent years.

Challenges of AI in healthcare and Sanofi’s AI-powered pharma strategy

Yet, deploying AI in healthcare sett…

Decoding Bayer’s digital health leap and its implications on drug discovery and personalized medicine

The German multinational pharma and biotech colossus Bayer is taking further steps to ramp up its focus on digital health by launching a new business unit. In 2022, Bayer invested $9.5 million in Woebot Health, an AI-powered behavioral health platform company. In 2020, it launched a venture known as G4A Digital Health Partnership Program to drive digital collaboration in cardiometabolic and renal disease, oncology and women’s health.

This new unit, the Bayer Precision Health group, plans to focus on identifying digital and digital-supported consumer healthcare opportunities. The group seeks to create new precision health products based on real-world evidence and digital technologies.

Bayer’s new digital health unit has a priority mission. It seeks to cultivate pioneering digital technologies. The goal? Empower individuals to make more informed health choices. It aims to accomplish that objective by uncovering novel delivery mechanisms, as our sister…

Deepcell’s REM-I platform marries AI with morphological analysis for drug discovery

Introducing Deepcell’s REM-I, which applies AI to cell morphology analysis.

From her early days as a research assistant at UCLA, to her work as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, Deepcell co-founder and CEO Maddison Mahdokht Masaeli has actively engaged in the field of biomedical engineering. Now, Masaeli and her team at Deepcell, a company she co-founded in 2017, are introducing a new strategy to drug discovery with the launch of REM-I. The platform combines AI and morphological analysis, a technique that studies the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.

“The REM-I platform offers several unique capabilities for deep assessment of single cell images and the ability to sort cells without bias,” Masaeli explained in an interview. “It is specifically designed to expose and analyze the heterogeneity within samples, as well as the heterogeneity in respons…

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”…

Pharmacovigilance in personalized medicine: Adapting to a new era of drug development

[Image courtesy of LeoWolfert via iStock]

One of the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on the pharma industry was how it highlighted the importance of pharmacovigilance. As personalized medicine gained traction, drug developers had to evolve their strategies to ensure safety and efficacy. In their report, “The Future of Pharmacovigilance,” Dr. Sabine Jeck-Thole and Ben Enejo, partners at Arthur D. Little, discussed the challenges and opportunities in this new landscape.

Embracing the shift in perception of adverse events and side effects

“When we heard about adverse events and side effects, it was not bad news,” Jeck-Thole said in an interview. “It indicated that we understood our drug or vaccine much better than without any safety information.” She emphasized that this shift in perception was essential for the industry as it moved towards pharmacovigilance in personal…