MUNICH - Ed Saltzman, senior strategic advisor at UK-based Lumanity - a consulting company focused on the healthcare industry - moderated this deep dive session to discuss proven examples of biopharma companies successfully using artificial intelligence (AI) at the BIO-Europe Winter 2023, which ran from November 6-8 in Munich, Germany,

Panelists who convened at the ‘The rise of AI in pharma’ session on November 6 included Najat Khan, PhD, Chief Data Science Officer and Global Head of Strategy, Portfolio and Operations at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) New Jersey-based unit Janssen Research & Development, Richard Law, Chief Business Officer at British pharmatech Exscientia, Michelle Chen, Chief Business Officer at AI-powered biotech Insilico Medicine - which has headquarters in Hong Kong and New York - and Matthias Müllenbeck, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Business Development & Alliance Management at Germany’s Merck.

Saltzman: We are all aware that the pharma industry has a big problem - drug discovery and drug development. Now, drug commercialization has become incredibly risky - much riskier than it has ever been, and yet we still do many of those things more or less the same way [as] we've done them for the past two decades. All of this will force consideration of how we can reduce the terrible toll these things take on successfully developing drugs and getting them to patients, so I think AI has a big role. While I don't doubt the impact, I don't know what to look for, and I don't know what signposts we'll see that say AI is having an impact. So, my first question is, how would you characterize AI in biopharma today?

Müllenbeck: We all agree that AI in biotech and AI in big pharma are rapidly evolving on all fronts