Novartis has announced that it will partner with Microsoft to drive forward drug development using artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
The Los Angeles Times reported on the collaboration, which will see the US tech giant and Swiss pharmaceutical company entering a five-year agreement. AI technology is set to be incorporated into many areas of Novartis’ business.
This includes finance and manufacturing. Microsoft will be working on new tools that make it simpler to introduce AI to these areas of the business.
In addition, there will be a focus on deep learning. It’s this area that will be used to potentially help develop new treatments and medicines. In particular, it’s hoped that this technology will lead to new breakthroughs in the area of personalised medicine, Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimham told the news provider.
“We believe that by applying AI methods to our large clinical and pre-clinical data sets, we should be able to identify the ‘super-responding’ patient populations, or patient populations that uniquely respond to different medicines, which could then lead to further testing,” he said.
Overall, Novartis hopes to reduce the cost of drug development, which has been stable for years.
The newspaper revealed that it takes an average of 14 years and costs $2.5 billion to discover and commercialise a new drug.
Earlier this month, a Hong Kong based firm used AI to help identify potential treatments for fibrosis. In just 21 days, the AI had identified six promising treatments. These were then synthesised in the lab, where four showed promise. Two were tested in cells and one was even tested on mice.
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