3 Powerful Ways AI Enhances Pharma Research

The pharmaceutical industry is moving and changing more than ever before.

Drug discovery is getting faster, pharma companies are increasingly tasked with understanding complexities around supply chains and financials, and real-time monitoring of drug approvals and regulatory activity is becoming essential. For the past several years, especially throughout the pandemic, AI has been critical to pharma companies’ ability to operate in an unpredictable and often volatile business environment.

AI is powering transformative pharmaceutical research, making it imperative for companies to leverage these advancements in order to innovative, stay competitive, and identify new opportunities for growth.

Related Reading: The Evolution of Pharma Market Research

AI Powers New Possibilities for Drug Discovery

Fast and accurate drug discovery has perhaps never been more critical than over the past two years, as leading pharmaceutical companies worked around the clock to develop and distribute vaccines for COVID-19.

The speed at which it happened would not have been possible without artificial intelligence. It made an impact at just about every point on the value chain. From research and development to clinical trial data to supply chain logistics to distribution tracking, AI has proven essential to combating the pandemic. Beyond the pandemic, its potential to advance disease treatment in general has never been more clear.

Pharma companies are paying attention, shifting financial resources and hiring strategies to meet the growing AI imperative. According to a GlobalData survey of pharmaceutical industry professionals, AI was the most disruptive technology in this sector throughout 2021, and we’ll see the same in 2022.

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The evidence is clear: in an increasingly competitive pharmaceutical landscape, AI is imperative for companies that want to be innovative, operate at the speed of their peers, and ultimately bring quality products to market.

3 Powerful Ways AI Enhances Pharma Research

1. Fight Data Fatigue and Decision Paralysis

Professionals in the pharma space must find key information, trends, and themes across a wide variety of documents to make smart decisions with speed. AI technologies make it possible to quickly comb through millions of research documents to identify addressable market data and unmet needs, perform faster quantitative data analysis, better understand how drug classes and regional markets are performing, and decipher the clinical and competitive landscapes to see what moves peers are doing.

2. Understand Market Impact

It is essential to have a breadth of coverage across all industries and all sectors. The pandemic has demonstrated just how crucial it is for pharma companies to be able to look beyond their standard data sets to see the bigger picture. Without notice, companies needed to understand not only disease and treatments but also global supply chains, financial impacts, remote work environments, new partnership opportunities, new sales and marketing strategies — and even new regulations for everything from clinical studies to personal protective equipment. With AI tools, companies can be more agile and responsive to these types of changing business demands.

3. Track New Developments

Conducting point-in-time research is reactive and ultimately sets a company up for potential failure. New AI advancements allow pharma researchers to be proactive. They’re able to monitor broad topical areas because AI technology can recommend critical data sets, new trends, and new entrant companies before anyone else knows about it. AI tools take the wealth of company information that’s available and make it digestible, meaningful, and usable by extracting the most relevant data points and sending real-time alerts so no important update or event is ever missed.

Related Reading: Top Pharma Trends to Watch in 2023

What It All Means For Pharma Investors

The pace of business and the competitive landscape is increasing rapidly. There is a greater desire to understand the vast amount of patient, research, and diagnostic data to make better investment decisions. Departments responsible for analytics and insights are flourishing. The amount of moving pieces is becoming more and more difficult to track, especially given the ever-increasing complexities of information.

This transformative change has resulted in more AI deals in the pharmaceutical sector than ever before. Between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, the number of overall AI deals increased by more than 25% and the number of AI companies that received financing more than doubled. In 2021, drug discovery startups driven by AI earned almost $4B in investor funding.

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With more than half of global healthcare companies expected to broadly adopt AI technologies by 2025 and expand them to address leading healthcare concerns like chronic illness and oncology diseases, investors in this space will find plenty of opportunity in the coming years.

It is no longer enough for pharma companies and professionals to simply acknowledge market shifts. They need to position themselves in a way that empowers their operational models and fuels innovation. If you’re relying on point-in-time data, manual searches, and gathering info from disparate sources, you’ll find yourself stuck in a reactive loop just trying to make sense of the new information that falls on your lap.

Uncover the nine ways AI can help you enhance your pharma research processes with our white paper, Advancing Pharma Research with Artificial Intelligence.