These start-ups promise to upend the stubbornly expensive and time-consuming R&D process for biopharma drugs.7“;) AI in biopharma research: A time to focus and scale,” McKinsey, October 10, 2022.
Between 2019 and 2022, VC investors poured more than $9 billion into start-ups focused on ML-enabled drug discovery. These start-ups promise to upend the stubbornly expensive and time-consuming R&D process for biopharma drugs.7“;) AI in biopharma research: A time to focus and scale,” McKinsey, October 10, 2022. ML models may improve the ability to select molecules with a higher probability of success and enable fit-for-purpose molecular design for newly identified disease targets. The field has yet to prove itself; most companies are still at the preclinical stage. Nonetheless, interest in the technology is growing rapidly, and ML is being incorporated across the pharma value chain (see sidebar “The future of biotech and AI”).