The strongest link?

In recent years, the increase in accessible, large-scale computing power and storage has ushered in a new dawn for artificial intelligence (AI), with the technology appearing to finally catch up with the existing algorithms to bring machine learning (ML) to realisation. In this article, we discuss some of the key applications of ML that have shown success in clinical research. Moreover, we consider how machine learning is impacting on clinical trials, utilising decades of structured clinical trial data alongside real-world data (RWD) and other valuable data sources to support clinical trial design, execution and analysis. Combining computational skills and drug development experience, data science teams can support the pharma and biotech industry to generate business value through the application of machine learning. For ML algorithms to be successful they require large, quality data sets for their application.