Following the news that Insilico Medicine has signed a billion-dollar, multi-target artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery deal with Sanofi;

Urte Jakimaviciute, Senior Director of Market Research at GlobalData, offers her view:

“Sanofi is among a number of companies that are quite aggressively tapping into AI-based drug development deals. In November 2021, it invested $180 million equity in AI start-up Owkin to advance its oncology pipeline. In January 2022, Sanofi signed a deal worth up to $5.2 billion with Exscientia to develop oncology and immunology treatments. This was followed by a $20 million deal with Atomwise.

“One of the biggest challenges in the drug discovery and development process is that thousands of compounds are subject to early preclinical testing, but only a few viable candidates make it to Phase I–III clinical trials and move to commercialization.

“There has been an increasing number of successful AI use cases in the pharma industry: for example, the AI-generated drugs developed by the Evotec-Exscientia and Sumitomo Dainippon-Exscientia collaborations that entered human clinical trials. The next big milestone would be to see AI-discovered drugs progressing into late-stage clinical trials.

“In a recent GlobalData survey with healthcare industry professionals, AI was selected as the technology that is expected to have the most disruptive power in the healthcare sector in the next two years. Viewed as an emerging technology that can disrupt and reshape the pharmaceutical sector, AI can certainly expand its application and coverage far beyond drug discovery and development.”

* Data taken from GlobalData’s Digital Transformation and Emerging Technology in the Healthcare Industry 2022 survey fielded with n = 114 healthcare industry professionals between September 14, 2022, to October 10, 2022.