AI to Manufacture Pharmaceuticals

The Tesla wave has also impacted the pharmaceutical industry. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have begun investing substantial amounts in artificial intelligence. The pharmaceutical sector aims to leverage the power of modern supercomputers and machine learning to develop drugs faster and at lower cost. Can Sökmen, General Director of Rad Ecza Deposu, provided the following information about this exciting global development:

"Many major pharmaceutical companies formed partnerships with artificial intelligence start-ups in 2017. Cambridge-based AstraZeneca in the United Kingdom is collaborating with Berg, a biopharmaceutical company based in Boston, Massachusetts, to find biological markers and drugs for neurological diseases. Genentech, a subsidiary of California-based Roche, is using the Cambridge platform with GNS Healthcare, based in Massachusetts, to employ artificial intelligence platforms to analyse oncology treatments. Japanese pharmaceutical giant Takeda formed a partnership with Numerate, a California-based company.

GSK, located in Brentford, United Kingdom, also joined this wave. In summer 2017, it announced collaboration with Scottish AI expert Exscientia to discover targets for up to 10 diseases and tested Zhavoronkov's Insilico Medicine algorithms. Thus, GSK became one of the first major pharmaceutical companies to establish its own in-house artificial intelligence unit.

Drugs with Fewer Side Effects

Insilico Medicine is working with Oxford University's Computational Cardiology and Cardiovascular Team to see whether artificial intelligence can design drugs with fewer side effects. For example, it is known that certain cancer drugs cause permanent cardiovascular damage.

Using gene expression data from cells incubated with different drugs, Mamoshina is training an artificial intelligence algorithm to identify cardiotoxic and non-cardiotoxic drugs.

The first approved drugs discovered through deep learning artificial intelligence approaches may be two to three years away, but many in this sector believe artificial intelligence is about to permanently transform the pharmaceutical industry.

Of 10 drugs entering clinical trials, only one reaches patients. Many people in the sector feel this trend is unsustainable and that change is inevitable. Resources are unwilling to pay further for drugs and the cost of failures, so there must be a change in business model, and artificial intelligence offers us an opportunity.