Generative AI is a useful tool in drug development. India so far focused on generics and low-cost vaccines. It has yet to be competitive in mainstream pharma market. India can scale up using AI.
It is difficult to compete with the US and European drug majors who have abundance of resources. India struggles to progress a drug beyond phase II clinical trials.
China used AI in new drug discovery to move ahead. China made a goal to reach human clinical trials by leveraging AI. In preclinical stages, a molecule was identified, and novel drug candidates were assessed for their binding efficacy with the molecule target. The preclinical trial outcomes were predicted using AI as a tool.
MIT discovered a new antibiotic that could be used in drug-resistant infections by using an ML algorithm. They bypassed traditional experimental approaches by rapidly screening a million plus chemical compounds.
Merck and Pfizer too leverage generative AI. Merck’s proprietary platform is ADDISON which is used for drug discovery. Pfizer uses AI-powered chatbots to deliver personalized messages to clinical trial participants.
AlphaFold (Google DeepMind product) predicts protein structures. Amino acid chains of proteins fold up into 3-D shapes. This determines its functions. A protein’s structure can alter its behaviour by introducing a drug that binds to protein. Traditional methods to map protein structures have limitations. So far only 20 per cent of human body’s 20,000 proteins have been mapped (2022). AlphaFold will solve this problem. It can predict the points where folds would be optimum.
Nvidia, the chip maker, has made BioNeMo — a generative AI platform. It facilitates for pharma companies the development of foundational models for drug discovery. It reduces unnecessary experimentation, and, in some case, this gets completely replaced.
Nvidia has partnered with Recursion, Amgen and Roche.
Gen AI is revolutionizing health sciences sector in India. Gen AI , it has been projected, could contribute $4-5 billion addition to GVA of the Indian pharma sector by 2030.