Big Pharma bets on AI to speed up clinical trials

investing.com:

By Natalie Grover and Martin Coulter

LONDON (Reuters) — Major drugmakers are using artificial intelligence to find patients for clinical trials quickly, or to reduce the number of people needed to test medicines, both accelerating drug development and potentially saving millions of dollars.

Human studies are the most expensive and time-consuming part of drug development as it can take years to recruit patients and trial new medicines in a process that can cost over a billion dollars from the discovery of a drug to the finishing line.

Pharmaceutical companies have been experimenting with AI for years, hoping machines can discover the next blockbuster drug. A few compounds picked by AI are now in development, but those bets will take years to play out.

Reuters interviews with more than a dozen pharmaceutical company executives, drug regulators, public health experts and AI firms show, however, that the technology is playing a sizeable and growing role in human drug trials.

Companies such as Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN), Bayer (OTC:BAYRY) and Novartis (SIX:NOVN) are training AI to scan billions of public health records, prescription data, medical insurance claims and their internal data to find trial patients — in some cases halving the time it takes to sign them up.

«I don't think it's pervasive yet,» said Jeffrey Morgan, managing director at Deloitte, which advises the life sciences industry. «But I think we're past the experimentation stage.»

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it had received about 300 applications that incorporate AI or machine learning in drug development from 2016 through 2022. Over 90% of those applications came in the past two years and most were for the use of AI at some point in the