Artificial Intelligence has played an increasingly important role within the pharmaceutical space especially with recent restrictions due to COVID-19. The drug development process can be lengthy and costly but many companies have begun implementing AI into their clinical trials to speed up patient on-site visits, test efficacy and bring more drugs to market. As we discussed previously, AI has played an important role in the discovery process. Now let's take a look at AI in clinical trials… PRNewswire reports the global virtual clinical trials market size is expected to reach 11.5 billion USD by 2028 with a compound annual growth rate of 5.7% from 2021 to 2028 according to Grand View Research, Inc. The growth in the virtual clinical trial space is directly related to the need for an increase in patient diversity and an increase in the number of decentralized/virtual trials due to the impact of COVID-19.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby talked with Dan Drapeau, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert and head of technology and Blue Fountain Media, about AI's role in the pharmaceutical industry. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Karen Roby: We're hearing about AI making such an impact in so many different industries, but it might surprise some that it's really entrenched now in pharmaceuticals. Dan Drapeau: There's been a growing need for it. Really, over the past few years, I'd say AI became a little bit more prominent in the pharma space, probably around 2015, 2016, when precision medicine became a little bit more popular. That's more around coming up with individualized treatment for patients rather than typically what the industry was doing, which is producing big blockbuster-type drugs.