Artificial Intelligence in Pharma: Positive Trends but More Investment Needed to Drive a Transformation

Over the past few years, pharmaceutical R&D has become aware of the potential benefits of leveraging artificial intelligence and its collective subfields including machine learning, deep learning, data science and advanced analytics. These technologies are being embraced across industries to provide enhanced automation, gain insights into data, and improve data-driven decision making. The evangelization from lower level technical experts has now been echoed by the top levels of many organizations, as exemplified by Vas Narasimhan’s (Novartis CEO) goal to evolve AI to place it at the “heart of the company” [1] and Alex Bourla’s (Pfizer CEO) aim to win the digital race in pharma using machine learning and AI to expedite R&D [2]. Although its value compared to pure science continues to be questioned, machine learning and particularly deep learning have introduced many compelling use cases.