It is well known that AI/ML have the potential for acceleration and innovation within pharmaceutical research and development. However, it is less widely known that the potential impacts span the entire drug development pipeline, from target identification, through molecule design and optimisation, clinical trials, and all the way to commercial investment decisions. This talk will describe how different ML/AI is being used right now across different parts of the pipeline, highlighting the design of molecules, graph AI methods for biological insight generation, computer vision technologies for automatic quality control and novel biomarkers, and clinical trial optimisation. The talk will conclude by giving an indication of the future outlook, along with some open challenges that are faced by the industry.

Speaker: Tom Diethe, Head of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Biopharmaceuticals R&D, AstraZeneca