AI’s infiltration of pharma: How COVID-19 accelerated change -

"The pharmaceutical industry has sometimes been a laggard in terms of digital maturity, but the COVID-19 crisis has provided companies the impetus to rapidly implement the most cutting-edge technologies. At the heart of most of these digital advancements is AI and machine learning.
With a collective sense of uncertainty, many are pinning their hopes on a vaccine and treatment, and sophisticated technology could help speed up the process of finding an effective medicine.
In January, Google DeepMind debuted AlphaFold, a deep-learning system that predicts the structure of several under-studied proteins, including those associated with COVID-19. Predicting protein structures would typically be a time-consuming process, but now scientists can use technology to better analyse viruses, thus helping in the search for a vaccine that can trigger an immune response.
Scientists are using AI to sift through existing literature on a disease and study its disease’s structure. This knowledge is critical in understanding how effective certain drugs might be in treating the virus. It has helped determine the availability of current drugs on the market that could be repurposed to treat COVID-19.
AI is also being used to track the spread of diseases and detect anomalies. Canadian artificial intelligence platform BlueDot was able to detect a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan before the world even knew about COVID-19. In countries like China, AI is integrated with track and trace mobile apps to aggregate and analyse data on the spread of the virus.
“A recent study by Kearney revealed 68% of global industry leaders in the healthcare sector see AI and advanced analytics as major value drivers, indicating most companies are aware of their combined potential”..." Lire la suite