I'm Jennifer Strong, and this is I Was There When--an oral history project featuring the stories of breakthroughs and watershed moments in AI and computing… as told by those who witnessed them. This episode, we meet Dave Johnson, the chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Moderna. Dave Johnson: Moderna is a biotech company that was founded on the promise of mRNA technology. My name is Dave Johnson. I'm chief data and AI officer at Moderna. mRNA is essentially an information molecule.

Impact Biomedical, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SGX-listed Singapore eDevelopment, has announced the initiation of Quantum, a research program designed as a solution to the'patent cliff', the impending pharmaceutical threat. A patent cliff looms when patents for blockbuster drugs expire without being replaced with new drugs, and pharmaceutical companies experience an abrupt decrease in revenue, reducing overall pharmaceutical innovation globally, including crucial research into new methods to prevent and treat illnesses. Impact, through their strategic partner Global Research and Discovery Group Sciences (GRDG), has created a solution called Quantum, a new frontier in pharmaceutical development. Quantum is a new class of medicinal chemistry that uses advanced methods to boost efficacy and persistence of natural compounds and existing drugs while maintaining the safety profile of the original molecules. Instead of modifying functional groups, as is typically done presently in drug discovery, this new technique alters the behavior of molecules at the sub-molecular level.

The process of discovering and developing a new drug typically costs $2-4 billion, takes 10-12 years and fails more than 95% of the time either in clinical trials or while going through the approval process.

What are some potential ways that machine learning can be used in pharmaceutical development? What are some potential ways that machine learning can be used in pharmaceutical development? There are literally hundreds of thousands of potentially relevant scientific papers published each year, no one has the capability to read through all of them or even read the review articles that attempt to summarize them. We've already surpassed the one million papers per year mark, and the curve appears to be exponential (even if that doesn't persist it's still an untenable amount of information for any human, or even group of humans, to realistically delve into.) This is where the basic science that leads to drug development gets its start.