Biopharma executives that pursue leapfrog digital innovation will be those best positioned in 2022 to gain an edge over the competition, according to the consultants behind that publication. To better understand the biopharma industry's experience with digital innovation now and in the year ahead, the Deloitte team surveyed 150 biopharma leaders and found that digital technologies such as the cloud (49%), AI (38%), data lakes (33%), and wearables (33%) have been adopted in day-to-day operations. Other technologies such as quantum computing and digital twins are still nascent. Some 82% of respondents agreed that digitalization of operations will continue even after the pandemic ends. Digital innovation is a burning strategic priority for biopharma leaders, found the Deloitte publication.

As scientists, we are no stranger to skepticism, having been taught to look at everything critically. While doling out skepticism, we also come across it often when working with other healthcare leaders or fielding questions from audiences at conferences or pitching an AI approach to investors. Much of the healthcare industry is still stuck in the 20th century, and hence, it is not so surprising that new technologies such as an AI-driven approach to biopharma may be met with raised eyebrows and thought to be doomed to failure from the outset. On the one hand, we have people saying that AI could revolutionize biopharma and help us to discover new treatment options, with Deloitte predicting that the AI/biopharma industry will be worth $3.88 billion by 2025. On the other, we have Elon Musk warning that AI could spell the end of civilization as we know it.

Health care startup Paige has raised an additional $15 million from Goldman Sachs to help diagnose cancer using computer vision trained on clinical imaging data. The funding shows that while COVID-19 investments are getting a lot of attention, AI-related efforts to fight cancer are also moving forward. The idea is to use data sets related to treatment and genomics to train deep learning networks to detect breast, prostate, and other major cancers. Paige builds computational pathology products to help pathologists deliver more accurate diagnoses to cancer patients and allow patients and their care teams to make faster, more informed treatment decisions. New York-based Paige has raised over $95 million to date.

A recent article about AI-based drug development, indicates the progressive use of A.I. technologies for the drug production industry, mining the huge amount of data collected from the pharmaceutical companies' data centers. Thanks to Deep Knowledge Ventures which a couple of days ago updated their research data, we took the opportunity to delve into the latest developments of this market. In the combined capitalization graph the BioPharma Industry seems to run a period of sluggish growth, while the IT & Tech industries are more active. This is important because it means that drug development nowadays derives from quite different sources than in the past. It certainly does not mean that Pharma Corporations stay out of the game as we can see in the graph of leading companies with hard investing sectors in AI for health care and new drugs development.