Significant Ways AI has Changed the Pharmaceutical Industry
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being embraced by many businesses recently, shaping their workflows and boosting productivity. One sector that has benefited from this modern advance is the pharmaceutical industry. We will go over some of the most significant ways AI has changed the pharmaceutical industry and assess what this means going forward.
Revolutionising the Pharmaceutical Industry with AI
In recent years, top pharmaceutical businesses have actively integrated AI into their strategies and drug developments, and several have started to collaborate with technology companies to take advantage of their expertise and resources to achieve a competitive edge.
AI has revolutionised the industry and brought significant differences. According to the statistics from ITIF (Gawora, 2020), AI can cut the time it takes to analyse and develop innovative drugs by 40% to 50% compared to conventional approaches, which could lead to $26 billion yearly cost savings.
It can also significantly lower the expenses by $28 billion annually. In addition to lowering prices, this will speed up the development of more potent medications and foster medical innovation.
Future Transformations and Improvements in the Pharmaceutical Industry
The pharmaceutical industry’s future is difficult to predict, but advances in AI may undoubtedly transform and bring significant improvements in the areas of producing personalised medicines, drug discovery, clinical trials, manufacturing, and predictive analytics.
It can help optimise patient selection, monitoring, and analysis of clinical trial data, improving accuracy, efficiency, and speeding up the drug approval process, thereby bringing new treatments to market more quickly.
In future, diseases outbreaks could be predicted using AI, and even help identify patterns in patient data, and optimise drug dosages. This could improve patient outcomes and significantly reduce healthcare costs.
Balancing the Benefits of AI and Concerns about its Impact on the Human Workforce
Then having considered how AI can impact the industry, it is natural to wonder if it will replace human labour and automate everything. To better understand these reasonable arguments, let’s analyse a few jobs, such as the roles of clinical trial coordinators, manufacturing technicians and researchers.
Clinical trial coordinators can benefit from AI’s help in patient selection and monitoring, which will increase the effectiveness and precision of clinical research. However, human coordinators are still required to manage the studies, guarantee patient security, and interact with patients.
AI can also assist technicians in streamlining and minimising waste during the drug manufacturing process, but the manufacturing machinery must still be operated and maintained by human technicians.
Similarly, AI can help researchers find new therapeutic targets and forecast drug effectiveness, which can speed up the process and cut expenses. Nevertheless, human researchers are needed to design experiments, interpret results, and make decisions based on the data.
Conclusion
Although the advent of AI in the pharmaceutical business is projected to have a substantial influence, it will be critical to balance the potential benefits of AI against the concerns about data privacy and security and the impact on the human workforce. If it is AI vs humans, it is unlikely to completely replace human professionals in the industry.
Instead, AI is more likely to support humans in their work while enhancing their productivity and task accuracy. However, AI, like any other technology, poses risks and challenges that the industry must tackle.
Global Voices has been facilitating communication solutions to the pharmaceutical industry for over 15 years, by means of translation, interpretation, and audio-visual solutions. If you would like to discuss ways to use translation services to help you overcome the challenges posed by AI, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Reference
- Gawora, K. (2020, December 7). Artificial Intelligence Can Save Pharmaceutical Companies. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation | ITIF. https://itif.org/publications/2020/12/07/fact-week-artificial-intelligence-can-save-pharmaceutical-companies-almost/