8 TECH OUTLOOKMAY - 2019IN MY OPINIONBy, Ben Newton, Chief Digital Officer, GE Healthcare Life SciencesIt's time to stop tiptoeing around applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the development and manufacturing of therapeutic drugs. If we use this tool carefully and thoughtfully, we will bring benefits to researchers, clinicians, and ultimately patients. The eventual widespread application of AI will stop the wasting of time and resources, and instead allow us to act quicker, based on insights from AI and other digital technologies. Note that I called AI a tool. I'm not calling it the answer to everything, although it can answer a lot of previously unanswerable questions. During my 20 years working in the healthcare industry leading the development, approval, and launch of numerous drug and diagnostic products I have been able to see many opportunities realized. There is an enormous desire to progress and help bring new treatments to patients. But now, with AI at our fingertips, we're moving ever closer.Here are five ways I see AI helping to reduce variables and speed up breakthroughs across the pharmaceutical and Life Sciences industries: 1) AI helps understand diseases betterThe many variables of early-stage drug development can cripple progress. Which drug molecule out of thousands to take forward to clinical development? Which disease site to target in a complex molecule? I believe AI and its subset, machine learning, are the technologies that will finally deliver on the promise of smarter Research and Development. At GE Healthcare, we recently introduced a machine learning module called "Phenoglyphs" to pair with our IN Carta and IN Cell software, used to understand cells. Phenoglyphs can understand various characteristics of the cells it is analyzing to uncover phenotypic differences in a patient's cell population. This can lead to the identification of unexpected subpopulations that never would have been detected manually. Increased efficiency in the work to understand disease results in better-targeted treatments.2) AI could address pharma's decades-old challengesClinical trial failure rates are some of the costliest practices in the healthcare industry. In the highly-promising space of immunotherapies, treatments which use the body's immune system to fight cancer, thousands of trials are taking or due to taking place. However, it's expected that a significant number of these will fail because the wrong patients are selected or the disease incorrectly stratified, thus costing pharmaceutical companies billions each year. GE Healthcare and Vanderbilt University Medical Center are collaborating on making AI-powered applications and new imaging PET-tracers to make immunotherapies safer and more Five ways Artificial Intelligence can Drive Efficiency and Empower People in Healthcare
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