Business


Disruptive approaches to accelerate drug discovery and development


part II: Emergent intelligence, a new paradigm for drug discovery


The staggering clinical trial failure rate of experimental drugs indicates that despite huge investments in novel technologies over the years, productivity gains in the pharmaceutical industry remained elusive. It is therefore generally agreed that the current biopharma model is unsustainable and disruptive approaches are needed to remedy the status quo. The biopharmaceutical industry is looking towards artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up drug discovery, cut R&D costs, decrease failure rates in drug trials and eventually create improved medicines. At last count (May 2018), there are about 81 Start- ups and 19 Pharma companies using AI for drug discovery2.


By Dr Anton Fliri, Dr Palaniyandi Manavaskam,


Dr Shama Kajiji,


Dr Gerald Lushington and Dr Rathnam Chaguturu


H 42


uman civilisation has a never-ending quest to make everything efficient, and inevitable creative waste is generated in


the name of efficiency. Many of our everyday tech- nologies and modern-day hi-tech inventions can be traced back to the bygone era of the 1930s. Many of the Silicon Valley start-ups that were based on connecting buyers and sellers of goods/services


much more cheaply and efficiently derived their inventive energy from the time-tested mechanical systems. The unintended consequences of all the efficiency that platform companies strove to achieve generated short-term efficiency at the expense of our ability to become more efficient in the long run3. To overcome this disparity, human intuition must


“The whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts1.”


Steven Johnson, Media Theorist


work together with technological efficiency. Skilled researchers can use search terms and arguments to unlock the full power of the search engine to find out what they are looking for by using ‘search intu- ition’ and becoming ‘information athletes’. Such information athleticism, based on robust algo- rithms, can unearth connections between disparate subjects that no one has imagined3.


Drug Discovery World Summer 2018


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