Using AI in pharma to ramp up efficiency

Artificial intelligence will continue to be integrated into pharma, and Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson has some ideas on how to do it effectively. The real promise, he opines, is in how it might help guide decision-making in drug discovery: "AI-enabled screening can sift through billions of possible molecules and allow R&D teams to shorten the search to find disease drivers and potential candidates," he writes in a new First Opinion. "We can also be broader in the diseases we target for low incremental cost."

There's also the "stackable AI" approach within organizations: Some AI-driven apps can take a complete look at how a company operates, "from finance to procurement and from supply to quality," he points out. These apps can help cut the fat, in a sense — "erasing levels of hierarchy in gleaning insights" and "eliminate wasted time." The idea is to better allocate resources (and perhaps, we wager, to cut out a middleman or two).

podcast

Are there still too many biotech companies?

How do you know when you're in a bubble? And is there a wrong way to pronounce "TIGIT?" We cover all that and more this week on "The Readout LOUD," STAT's biotech podcast.

Josh Schimmer and Eric Schmidt, two longtime analysts teaming up at Cantor Fitzgerald, join us for a back-to-school conversation as biotech enters the busy back third of 2023. We also discuss the latest news in the life sciences, including some scientific evolution at Biogen, new leadership at Illumina, and the future of CRISPR medicine.

Listen here.

glp-1 drugs

The future of obesity drugs stretches far past obesity

Those wildly popular GLP-1 agonists for obesity: They're just the tip of the iceberg "of what's going to be a very long journey in a very large market," said Nancy Thornberry, CEO of obesity therapeutics company Kallyope. She spoke at the STAT Future Summit this week along with the chiefs of Structure Therapeutics and Aardvark Therapeutics, who are all in the same race to create more convenient and effective treatments for weight management. But the potential stretches far beyond.

"If this was just obesity, maybe Lilly and Novo would continue being the dominant pharmaceutical companies, but we're seeing cardiovascular, we're seeing NASH, addiction, so many different disease effects," said Structure CEO Raymond Stevens. "We're talking about overall human health here. It's not just one thing. So I think almost all the pharma companies will need to come into this space."

rebranding

Why Novartis is shortening the name of its R&D hub

Novartis is tightening ship: It'll pare away more exploratory projects, and focus keenly on those that will likely yield commercially successful drugs. The name of the Swiss pharma giant's R&D arm is even getting a refresh: It's going from "Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research" to a simpler "Novartis BioMedical Research." This is a pretty big philosophy shift for the Cambridge-based outfit, which has typically pursued projects out of sheer curiosity — and at times yielded great success, like with the blockbuster leukemia drug Gleevec. Now, however, there will be fewer projects underway, but more researchers will work on each one.

"Before we worked on so many different disease areas, in a way we were sort of skimming the surface," Fiona Marshall, the hub's president, said during the STAT Future Summit. "Now we're more aligned on a smaller number of disease areas. It means we can go much deeper. It means we can do more exploratory research in those disease areas than we were doing before."