AI’s Role In Boosting Revenue For The Pharmaceutical Sector

Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have an impact in every sector over the next few years, including the life pharmaceutical industry, as it is thought the technology could boost its economic value by up to $110 billion (£87.21 billion) a year. 

This is because AI can be used to identify compounds at a much faster rate, which means their development and approval can be turned around more quickly. 

AlphaFold 3, which is an AI model from Google DeepMind, can anticipate the structure and interactions of biological molecules, such as DNA, RNA and proteins. 

As there are more than 200 million known proteins, determining the structure of one can take years, meaning scientists can spend a long time trying to understand a disease and find a medicine to treat it. 

AlphaFold 3 is so revolutionary, as it “could unlock more transformative science, from developing biorenewable materials and more resilient crops, to accelerating drug design and genomics research”. 

Therefore, the technology could be used to understand diseases that have been neglected but still affect millions of people every year. This includes Chagas disease, which is transmitted by bloodsucking insects, and leishmaniasis, which can leave ulcerative lesions on internal organs. 

Not only will AI be able to advance medical research in these areas, it could also generate between $60 and $100 billion annually for the pharmaceutical industry, according to the McKinsey Global Institute report. 

By increasing the speed of drug discoveries, approvals and life science marketing, treatments can become available far more quickly, capturing interest from the public and the medical sector. 

It currently takes ten years and $1.4 billion for one drug to come to the market, but this could be made more efficient and refined with AI tools.