One of the fastest expanding technologies on the planet at present is Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has been gaining so much popularity lately that even industry and sector have applications and use cases for it. Even from smart factories using AI to ramp up their production efforts, to the smart assistant in people’s smartphones, AI is powering the world of today and tomorrow.
Today, owing in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry is ramping up its artificial intelligence use at a rate that might lead to faster illness cures. Pharmaceutical businesses are coming up with new and creative methods to employ contemporary technology to tackle some of the industry’s most pressing problems and challenges. We will be looking into the role of AI in the pharmaceutical industry, its advantages and the impact it has on the industry.
AI in the Pharmaceutical Industry
To help get safe and dependable medications to market, the pharmaceutical industry has traditionally depended on cutting-edge techniques and technology. Even though it might show up on a superficial level that the pharma industry’s undertaking is just a test of skill and endurance to find a viable vaccine in the wake of the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is the utilization of advanced innovation and technologies that empowered them to achieve this noteworthy triumph. Artificial intelligence has played a crucial role in the pharmaceutical business in this regard. Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized how scientists discover new medications, combat diseases and more in the pharmaceutical sector during the last five years.
AI is increasingly being used in the biopharma sector, from early-stage drug development to prescription treatment choices, with a predicted market volume of $10 billion by 2024, encompassing AI-based medical imaging, diagnostics, drug discovery, genomics and personal AI assistants. Below are the key areas in the pharma industry where AI has helped and is regularly contributing to:
- Improvements in drug discovery and design
The main advantage of using AI in the pharmaceutical business is that it reduces the time it takes to test a medicine as well as the time it takes for drug approval and its reach to the market. This leads to significant cost reductions, lowering prescription expenditures for patients. The first screening of therapeutic compounds to the anticipated success rate based on biological parameters, as well as detecting RNA and DNA, may be done swiftly with the aid of AI. This is how AI-powered precision medicine, also known as next-generation sequencing, aids in medication development.
- Improvements in drug manufacturing
Artificial Intelligence offers various potentials to enhance procedures in medication research and manufacture. Pharma firms can cut design time, reduce material waste, enhance production reuse, perform predictive maintenance and more with the aid of Artificial Intelligence in the pharmaceutical sector. Artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical sector improves the medication manufacturing process not only by increasing productivity and reducing waste but also by ensuring that activities are completed with extreme precision and that the product’s Critical Quality Attributes (CQAs) are satisfied.
- Improvements in drug supply chains
The biopharma supply chain is made up of a lot of complicated procedures and interactions that AI can help with. This involves making decisions, organizing operational efficiency and, in the end, establishing a cost-effective, near-autonomous and flourishing supply chain. AI-based solutions can extract information from the supply chain, allowing market demand and medicine supply to be better aligned. Companies can build cost-effective, dependable and resilient processes across the supply chain using digitalization and intelligent process automation (IPA). This enables sophisticated judgments to be made based on the outputs of robotic inputs, reducing mistakes, increasing performance metrics and providing strategic insights.
- Improvements in Pharmacovigilance
Pharmacovigilance is the study and practice of monitoring medication safety by detecting, analyzing, comprehending and preventing adverse drug effects and other drug-related issues. Pharmacovigilance entails gathering and processing large quantities of data. In this field, artificial intelligence brings up possibilities for solving categorization and prediction issues. This promotes efficiency and the development of new ideas. AI-powered apps can automate the repetitive and manual activities involved with clinical case processing, reducing the time it takes to process cases and lowering total pharmacovigilance expenses.
- Improvements in regulatory information management
Another significant area of the pharmaceutical business that might benefit from AI technology is regulatory issues. Pharma firms must comply with shifting rules and stay up to speed with the newest worldwide and local industry standards and laws in addition to the complicated discovery and research procedures. To secure medication approval, pharmaceutical firms require accurate interpretation, application and communication both within and outside the organization. Advanced artificial intelligence technologies can offer regulatory affairs professionals with fast, insightful data to enhance these workflows by evaluating new and current federal regulations governing drug development procedures.
- Strengthening the drug adherence
Drug adherence is required for any medical treatment to be effective. Only following medical recommendations about medicine, nutrition, exercise and mental health may help a patient succeed. Because there aren’t enough resources to provide remote treatment at the patients’ homes, adherence can only be monitored through regular office visits. In the field of adherence monitoring, artificial intelligence is gaining popularity. This may be accomplished in a variety of ways, including through the use of various internet-of-things devices and centralized data collecting.
- Empowerment in epidemic prediction
Pharma firms and the healthcare industry are utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to track and analyze the spread of diseases throughout the world. These modern technologies use data gathered from disparate sources on the internet to investigate the impact of a variety of environmental, biological and geographic factors on population health in various geographic regions and attempt to connect the dots between these factors and the occurrence of previous epidemics.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have a lot of potential in the pharmaceutical sector. As more and more pharma firms use AI and ML, these contemporary technologies will become increasingly democratized, making them more accessible to small and medium-sized enterprises. AI is not just changing the way the pharmaceutical business works; it is also providing medication manufacturers with new opportunities to boost brand value.
Conclusion
In the pharmaceutical industry, AI-based solutions are gaining traction and are quickly becoming the new competitive battleground for many companies. To analyze huge volumes of health data efficiently, the pharmaceutical sector badly needs digital transformation and innovative technology. It discovers important connections between them, reducing medication production time to market.