In November 2020, Google’s DeepMind announced the release of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based
program ‘Alphafold’ and It was made available to entire scientific community in July, 2021. This program
has been recognized as a solution to 50-year-old grand challenge of solving the 3-dimensional structure
of proteins in the biological system. The program predicted the structures accurately resembling with
the experimental structures in a majority of cases. Recently, Alphabet announced the launch of
Isomorphic Laboratories which claims to “reimagine the entire drug discovery process from the ground
up with an AI-first approach.” If we look closely, there are already a few pharma-tech companies which
claim to use AI in their drug discovery. Exscientia is one of the most buzzing name which has put three
compounds in human trials, one in collaboration with Evotec for cancer and two in collaboration with
Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma for CNS diseases. InSilico Medcine, DeepGenomics, Valence Discovery,
Abcellera, Insitro are some of the other companies seeking/providing AI-based solutions to challenges
faced at various stages of drug discovery and development. According to analysis by Deloitte, the AI
market in drug discovery is expected to reach upto $2.9bn by 2025.
As drug discovery and development is time-consuming and costly affair, Indian Pharmaceutical sector
has kept their focus mainly on generics or contract research services. A few companies who are really
interested in drug discovery R and D went for integrated drug discovery platform and collaborated with big
and medium-sized Pharma companies to fund their research. Adapting AI at different stages of R and D
may cut down the cost and time significantly; which has been the major roadblock so far for pharma
companies in India. Though, some computational tools have been used in industries for the past decade
here and there, India has also started to catch-up to the latest progress. A Bengaluru-based tech start-up
Bayes labs and an Indo-German company Innoplexus are into developing AI and machine learning (ML)
based solutions accelerate the process. If Indian stalwarts of drug discovery and development put their
trust and collaborate with such tech companies probably we may see the rise of Indian Pharma R and Ds.
Garima Priyadarshani, Ph.D.
Pharma professional since a decade.