The market for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the process of designing new drugs will increase more than fivefold within the next five years, predict analysts at MarketsandMarkets. Signs of dynamic growth are already visible, with pharmaceutical giants signing several large deals in recent days to use AI solutions in predicting and preliminarily evaluating candidates for new drugs. Models of the immune system and algorithms analyzing the effectiveness and safety of targeted therapies are accelerating the pace of drug innovation implementation and increasing the efficiency of new drug development processes, which is currently very low, at only 10%.
“In the beginning, there was a lot of skepticism about the use of artificial intelligence in drug development. At this point, for the past two or three years, we notice that biotech and pharmaceutical companies see a need to introduce these technologies into their drug development processes, which is very encouraging. I am convinced that this trend will continue. Many people already see how powerful these technologies are. Biotech companies also see that they should use them,” Janusz Homa, CEO of Ardigen, told Newseria Innovations.
The PhenAID platform, developed by a company based in Krakow, streamlines the identification and profiling of candidates for small molecule drugs, using the power of multimodal data. The solution works based on the analysis of molecular structures, High Content Screening images, and multiomic data. The platform allows various predictive and generative tasks to be performed through easily configurable pipelines based on AI.
“We are building AI-based platforms that are used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies for drug discovery, both small molecules and biologicals. We are constantly improving this technology,” explains Janusz Homa.
Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly interested in using AI in drug design. Recent announcements of collaborations with AI solution providers by major pharmaceutical companies attest to this trend. In late September, AstraZeneca signed an agreement with Israeli start-up Immunai specializing in AI. As part of the $18 million deal, the British manufacturer will use the immune system model and machine learning to make decisions about dosage selection, verifying mechanism of action and patient’s reaction to treatment, and identification of biomarkers, among others. At around the same time, Finnish Orion Pharma formed a similar collaboration with technology company Aita. Novartis signed an even larger deal with Generate Biomedicines, focusing on research on protein therapies in several disease areas using the genAI platform.
“We hope that over time, the coverage of areas where AI will be used will increase, covering the entire drug discovery process eventually. The future is clearly in automation. These will be labs operated by robots and which generate a large amount of data that will in turn be used for machine learning processes, so the algorithms will learn. I hope that the probability of success, which is currently at only 10%, will be significantly higher. Also, that the time when a drug sees the light of day and patients can benefit from it will be significantly shorter, and the cost will be significantly lower,” predicts Ardigen’s CEO.
According to MarketsandMarkets, the market for AI in drug discovery will see very dynamic growth in the coming years. It was valued at $900 million in 2023 and is expected to increase to $4.9 billion by 2028.
