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In a new report, analysts GlobalData note that disruptive digital technologies, like artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and blockchain technology, will affect all business sectors. The impact also extends to the pharmaceutical industry. The impact will be felt in terms of adding value in the emergent area of personalized treatment (where medicines are tailored for individual patients). Another area will be to counteract the unsustainability of ever-rising medicine prices, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. Prices of drugs have been rising, for most products, way above the rate of inflation, as noted in Scientific American.

The biomedical startup was founded by University of Toronto alumni David Q. Chen, Elvis Wianda, Liran Belenzon, Tom Leung.So far the venture has raised US$8 million, contributed by a group of investors including Montreal's iNovia Capital and Google's Gradient Ventures (which is Alphabet's AI venture capital firm). The new company is called BenchSci and it aims to use artificial intelligence to scan through millions of data points, drawn from published research papers, in order to find new compounds that can help to accelerate the drug discovery process. The focus of the new venture is with finding commercial antibodies. The researchers spent two years building machine learning software that can extract antibody usage data from published figures. This involves decoding millions of papers, with the end result of making the data easily discoverable for scientists.

Cutting-edge technologies are increasingly improving pharma's R&D processes, which will reduce costs and, in turn, benefit patients, says Gunjan Bhardwaj. It's no secret that drug prices are a controversial issue. Just last week, US President Trump called high drug prices an "injustice" and vowed to make the issue a priority for his administration. In the face of such pressure, pharmaceutical companies are eager to reduce the cost of drug development so that consumer prices can be lowered without sacrificing profit margin. Fortunately, cutting-edge technologies such as AI, blockchain, and big data have the potential to eliminate costly inefficiencies in the drug discovery and development process.