Cloud computing and AI are revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry by helping speed up and reduce the cost of new drug development.
Cloud computing is becoming the cornerstone of the digital transformation, as it brings not only utilities to computing technology but also hospitals and health care systems. Even pharmaceutical companies are using the cloud to fundamentally change their business practices.
Discovering the Computational Drug model that uses a combination of cloud computing and artificial intelligence to make pharmaceutical development process faster and cheaper. Big drug companies are taking advantage of the advances in AI and the computing power of the cloud to test this new approach.
Pharmaceutical companies are using this high-tech process to develop and improve traditional remedies as well as complete new lists of drugs that work at the DNA and RNA levels to prevent diseases. Giant cloud providers are the new important partners for this drug development process.
To understand why this combination is revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry, you need to understand how slow, risky, and expensive drug development is in the United States.
Drug development research - a process full of costs and risks
When a pharmaceutical company wants to develop a new drug, the team needs to choose a condition and a molecule to start exploring its possibilities. When the company found a promising compound, the clinical trial began.
New remedies need to successfully go through 4 stages to get FDA approval. It is a lengthy and costly process. Depending on the drug being tested, the second phase of the trial could cost from US $ 7 million to US $ 19 million and the third stage budget would be even higher: from US $ 11.5 million to US $ 52. , 9 million USD. Only about 13% of the drugs that start this process reach drug stores.
But with the computer modeling approach used in drug development, the chances of success are higher. Researchers can use this model to determine which drugs are safest for patients and with the least side effects. Making the right choices at the beginning of the development process will increase the likelihood that the new drug will become more effective and improve existing products.
That's why drug companies need the massive computing power that cloud companies are providing, and the ability to scale computing quickly. Amazon Web Service, Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) are all working with drug companies and startups to bring this new approach to drug development.
What are cloud companies contributing to this process?
AWS is currently a central factor for drug development research and development in Moderna. Moderna is a company that creates new treatments using Information RNA (Messenger RNA or mRNA). Medicines built with mRNA can tell the body to make certain proteins to treat or prevent a specific disease.
Moderna is now using AWS's cloud computing capabilities to run algorithms to design each mRNA chain. Moderna uses instances of Amazon EC2 to process the calculation and return the results. With AWS, Moderna can shorten the time needed to find potential drugs for clinical trials and bring new treatments.
In 2017, Microsoft announced the creation of a technology development alliance with Parexel, a global biopharmaceutical service organization. These companies combine Microsoft's cloud infrastructure with Parexel's clinical technology to support drug development.
Microsoft is also the backer of Cloud Pharmaceuticals, a drug discovery company founded in 2011. The company's technology platform, Quantum Molecular Design, uses a combination of artificial intelligence and quantitative chemistry. Advanced molecular analysis and cloud computing to identify the most promising candidates for new small-molecular treatments.
Alphabet also doesn't want to miss the opportunity to make a new breakthrough for an age-old industry like medicine, by focusing on AI. The research team at DeepMind - the AI startup acquired by Alphabet in 2014 - is using AI to understand the scrolling mechanism of protein chains.
Nearly every function of the body is guided by the shape and movement of proteins. As a result, when proteins become deformed or distorted, it can lead to a variety of conditions, including diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. If researchers have a tool to accurately adjust protein structure, it will solve many problems of the 21st century, such as health, ecology, environment and almost anything related. to life systems.
In late 2018, DeepMind launched one of its AlphaFold products. Its algorithm defeated 97 other competitors in the protein-roll prediction contest with a prediction of 25 out of 43 proteins, while the runner-up only predicted 3 out of 43 correctly. the protein.
It's not hard to see what cloud computing platforms are doing to help researchers and pharmaceutical companies in analyzing and understanding this vast amount of data to develop new treatments. .
