New technologies in the pharmaceutical industry
The pharmaceutical industry also benefited from the new technologies. Thanks to them, new proteins are being discovered for the rapid development of pharmaceutical drugs.
The pharmaceutical industry was one of the sectors that benefited the most from the emergence and implementation of these new technologies. In its case, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have made the development of drugs and treatments faster and in greater volumes. At the same time, it helps to reduce research costs and the error percentages in clinical trials. Machine learning allows to analyze in massive ways the differences in cellular structures that emerge from microscopic images.
A universal example of the speed at which these tools, such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, among others, act is the rapid launch of the vaccine against Covid-19, a disease that was advancing so fast, could have its vaccine in a few months.
Thanks to the new contributions provided by these new technologies, hypotheses are generated faster, thus accelerating clinical trials for the production of drugs. Many companies and hospitals are betting and investing in these complements, which facilitate processes. A first example is Moderna: the renowned U.S. biotechnology company that used state-of-the-art software and algorithms to make one of the Covid-19 vaccines available to us. A second example is Exscientia: the pharmaceutical company uses Artificial Intelligence for the discovery of new drugs and, thanks to this, managed to develop the first drug created by Artificial Intelligence which was tested on humans, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma.
Another two entities use similar models to Dall-E, an artificial intelligence program that creates images from descriptions, for the generation of proteins to make pharmaceutical drugs. On the one hand, we have Generate Biomedicines with its “Chroma” program, which they define as the “DALL-E 2 of biology”. On the other hand, a team from the University of Washington, led by biologist David Baker, built a similar program: RoseTTAFold. Both of these programs are pioneers in producing more accurate designs for a wide variety of proteins.
The new technologies undoubtedly not only facilitate the efficiency, accuracy and speed of clinical trials, but also reduce research costs and time. In turn, it improves the quality of patients, who will be able to receive more personalized treatments for whatever their pathology may be.
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