All of the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies are using AI to develop new drugs, and information technology (IT) companies such as Google, Amazon, and Nvidia have jumped into the market. However, Korea’s AI new drug development is still in its infancy. Among the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in Korea, only three have AI organizations: Daewoong Pharmaceutical, JW Pharmaceutical, and HK Inno. Critics point out that while an increasing number of companies are collaborating with IT companies, they still have a long way to go. According to pharmaceutical and bio industries, global pharmaceutical companies are rapidly using artificial intelligence (AI) to develop new drugs. They use self-learning Generative AI to solve questions and challenges requested by users. Developing new AI new drugs has become a necessity, not an option for global pharmaceutical companies. Beyond actively collaborating with external AI companies, they have gone further to the stage of creating an AI-only organization and internalizing a platform. This is because AI technology can reduce the time required to develop new drugs by half and reduce the cost by one-third. Pfizer aims to release 19 new drugs within the next 18 months. It is possible to realize the seemingly impossible goal because of its AI platform VOX provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Pfizer has already completed experiments with AWS to increase productivity using the AI platform in 17 projects. “As 13 drugs have already been released, I don’t think that’s an impossible goal,” said Lydia Fonseca, Pfizer’s chief digital and technology officer. “Digital, data and AI are the key to our success.” Moderna released its own planetary AI platform “mCHAT” in May last year in collaboration with OpenAI. This is the result of data on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) drugs that have been accumulated for more than a decade with the AI platform. Nearly 65 percent of its employees are actively utilizing mCHAT to increase work efficiency. “AI helps optimize Moderna’s value chain, ranging from drug design to commercial manufacturing,” said Francesca Cedia, Moderna’s chief medical officer. “The AI algorithm can design specific treatments for individual patients and manufacture and deliver personalized treatments (INTs) in a timely manner.” MSD is also very interested in integrating AI into new drug development. MSD operates five technology centers — three in the U.S., one in the Czech Republic and one in Singapore — and is collaborating with teams related to AI, cyber security, automation and data analysis across the company. “We are introducing technologies such as AI and machine learning to the multiple stages of drug development, including the initial stage of finding candidate materials,” a MSD source said. “We are quickly analyzing a large amount of research data so that better information-based decisions can be made.” Amgen introduced the AI Bionimo for the development of new drugs and built the DGX Superpot, Nvidia’s data center platform, at its headquarters in Iceland. Amgen plans to create a comprehensive human body map for the discovery of new drugs and biomarkers of diseases. Sanofi introduced an application called Plai, which was developed in collaboration with AI company Ailee Labs, to support the development of new drugs. It also acquired Ammunix Pharmaceuticals, Inc. for 937 million dollars, which uses AI to develop drugs that can only be activated in tumor tissues. The reason why global Big Pharma is jumping into the development of new drugs is that AI big data can drastically reduce the cost and duration of development by predicting and designing what it had to prove through direct experiments during the development of new drugs. New drug development is a long process in which only one out of 10,000 candidates (0.01%) is released even at trillions of costs for years. However, the use of AI can drastically reduce time and cost. According to the Korea Health Industry Promotion Agency, the average 15-year development period can be reduced to $432 million by using AI for new drug development. The global market for AI new drug development is expected to grow by an average of 45.7% per year from $69.8 million in 2022 to reach $40.3 billion by 2027.
JENNIFER KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
