Traditional pharmaceutical companies actively embrace artificial intelligence and accelerate new drug research and development

[industry trends of pharmaceutical Station] recently, AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical giant, announced a long-term cooperation with benevolentai, a British artificial intelligence company, to accelerate the research and development of two new therapeutic drugs for chronic kidney disease (IPF) and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (CKD) by using AI technology It is understood that CKD and IPF are two complex diseases Benevolentai company has the benevolentai platform of artificial intelligence system, which can mine and analyze a large number of complex biomedical information, and put forward fair new assumptions, which can more effectively reduce the uncertainty risk of human research and development of new drugs The two companies said that scientists from both sides will work together to combine AstraZeneca's genomics, chemistry and clinical data with the benevolent platform to jointly interpret the results of the study, so as to understand the potential mechanism of these complex diseases and identify new potential drug targets more quickly According to the industry, new drug R & D has the characteristics of long R & D cycle, high cost, high risk and low success rate With the development of artificial intelligence technology, it is found that the "Ai + new drug R & D" model can effectively solve these problems Among them, a report from tech energy on the application of artificial intelligence in all industries shows that artificial intelligence can increase the success rate of new drug research and development from 12% to 14%, saving billions of dollars for the biopharmaceutical industry In the context of fierce competition in the global pharmaceutical industry, in addition to AstraZeneca, large pharmaceutical enterprises such as Pfizer, Novartis, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, Amgen and Merck are also actively embracing artificial intelligence and accelerating new drug research and development At the beginning of April, for example, exscientia said it had delivered a candidate drug discovered through artificial intelligence in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline It is reported that this is a potential treatment for COPD As early as July 2017, GlaxoSmithKline cooperated with exscientia, a company that uses AI for drug research and development On March 22, Novartis and Tencent signed a strategic agreement on the application of artificial intelligence to chronic disease management, which is committed to the research and development of new drugs for multiple chronic diseases and the management of chronic diseases by artificial intelligence As early as 2015, MSD cooperated with atomwise Its pioneering atomnet technology platform can think logically like human pharmaceutical chemists It uses powerful deep learning algorithms and supercomputer tools to analyze millions of potential therapies every day, so as to speed up the drug development process In November 2016, Johnson & Johnson reached a cooperation with benevolent AI to transfer some small molecular compounds that are still under test to the latter for new drug development In December 2016, Pfizer signed an agreement with IBM to use IBM Watson system to assist Pfizer in the development of immune tumor drugs In May 2017, Sanofi signed a potential EUR 250 million cooperation and licensing deal with exscientia to develop small molecule drugs for metabolic diseases In addition to foreign AI companies, Chinese enterprises also cooperate with multinational pharmaceutical companies in new drug research and development For example, in May 2018, Jingtai technology and Pfizer launched a strategic R & D cooperation Jingtai technology will provide Pfizer with drug crystal design and screening technology In addition, it will use quantum physics and artificial intelligence to develop and build a drug molecular simulation platform for Pfizer in the cloud for drug discovery and design, and realize the prediction of multiple key drug attributes In general, at present, the trend of artificial intelligence + new drug research and development is spreading With the gradual implementation of many achievements, it will bring benefits to more drug companies and patients However, the industry also pointed out that the current application of artificial intelligence in new drug research and development still needs to face many problems, such as talent shortage, data standardization and sharing mechanism, business model innovation and so on.