How big pharma is using AI for drug discovery, clinical trials, and more

Like almost any field in the healthcare industry pharma wants to get in on the latest technology trends. Recently big pharma has been looking to artificial intelligence as another tool to help facilitate drug research and help the company progress. At the World Medical Innovation Forum in Boston on April 24, a panel of pharma leaders discussed the future of AI in the industry. "It's quite top of mind for us at Novartis as we are reimagining life science companies like ours as medicines companies powered by data and digital and also because the radical advances, perhaps driven by consumer applications of this critical vector of computer science, have overt, immediate, and profound downstream relevance," Dr. Jay Bradner, president of Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, said at Tuesday's event. That doesn't mean companies are ready to replace their researchers with robots anytime soon. Instead Bradner explained these tools are expected to help scientists.