Professor Jackie Hunter looks at why the pharmaceutical industry has been so slow to adopt artificial intelligence-based technologies and makes a prediction for the industry's future, including a significantly increased amount of interplay between large technology and pharma companies. There is no doubt that the pharmaceutical industry is ripe for disruption. Costs over the past two decades have soared – it currently costs USD 2.6bn to develop a drug – but the industry has not delivered high levels of innovation in return. True, important new medicines have been delivered, especially in biological areas such as immune-oncology and multiple sclerosis, but other areas such as dementia and brain cancer have not seen therapeutic advances. The past two decades have also seen an explosion of biomedical data, making it impossible for even the most learned researchers to process and garner real insight from this wealth of information.

The past decade has seen disruption become a key catchphrase in business, politics and public thought, as the impact of disruption spreads across economies. While this disruption may manifest as new business models, and the upending of old ones, it is technology that is enabling all of this change. The insurance sector is being particularly affected by disruption. Smart phones have created a new means of distributing insurance products and lodging claims. The vast amounts of data generated and collected each day create opportunities for better underwriting and new products. Furthermore, the importance of digital assets has created opportunities for new insurance products, such as cyber-insurance.