Pharma companies turn to AI to speed up drug development, but hit hurdles
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When Genentech licensed experimental drug vixarelimab from Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals, its scientists thought they had a future lung medicine in their hands. Artificial intelligence came up with another plan.
It was an AI platform that led Genentech–a U.S.-based biotechnology unit of Switzerland’s Roche–to discover that the drug candidate it had licensed for its potential to target a lung condition could also work to treat inflammatory bowel disease. “It’s like, in some way, searching for a needle in a haystack," said Aviv Regev, Genentech’s executive vice president for research and early development. “We did it based on data and algorithms.
We didn’t do it based on ‘now we go back to the lab and we do large-scale experiments and we use these experiments in order to understand the biology.'" Executives and industry experts caution that AI adoption is still at an early stage and that it will take time, possibly years, before its potential is achieved. Still, some big pharmaceutical companies are ramping up the use of AI to discover and develop drugs. Their hope is that the technology will help them accelerate and optimize a long and expensive process that often fails to deliver results.
A tally by Boston Consulting Group found at least 67 clinical trials that were under way in 2023 evaluating experimental drugs and vaccines in which AI either discovered, designed or repurposed molecules or target diseases. That compares with 40 clinical trials in 2022 and 27 in 2021, according to the Boston Consulting Group. British drug giant AstraZeneca’s use of AI for drug discovery across its portfolio shortened the time it took to design molecules from years to months and sometimes even weeks, the
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