AI Applications on the Rise in Healthcare, Boosting Biopharma and Diagnostics Efficiency

Expectations for AI in healthcare, particularly biopharma and diagnostics, have been high for several years now. New partnerships and acquisitions may be setting the stage for a breakout year in AI-driven healthcare applications. Most notably, BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and other big names have been stepping up their involvement with machine learning. Neural networks that form the basis of generative AI, similar to what is being utilized by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, may soon become popular vectors of drug discovery.

Related ETFs: VanEck Pharmaceutical ETF (PPH), SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (XBI), Robo Global Robotics and Automation Index ETF (ROBO)

Recent advances and investments in artificial intelligence (AI) have been making major headlines lately. As MRP highlighted last week, Microsoft’s potential investment of $10 billion to expand their stake in OpenAI, the creator of popular AI tools ChatGPT and DALL-E, could more than double the startup’s valuation to $29 billion. OpenAI’s suite of products, now set to go premium for use by corporations, utilizes generative AI, which produces unique images, text, and other mediums of communication from human prompts. About 175 billion machine learning (ML) parameters make up the deep learning neural network used in OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-3. To put things in perspective, Analytics Insight notes that Microsoft’s Turing NLG model, which has 10 billion parameters, was the largest learned language model before GPT-3.

Data and parameters used in neural networks and their resultant outputs can be focused on different subjects and industries. The healthcare industry, particularly biopharma and diagnostics, is a business where generative AI is expected to create major disruption in the years ahead. Per survey data published in a recent GlobalData report, The State of the Biopharmaceutical Industry – 2023, 39% of surveyed healthcare industry professionals believed that AI would trend as the most disruptive emerging technology in the sector throughout this year. AI has been voted as the most disruptive emerging healthcare technology every year since 2020, according to Pharmaceutical Technology.

Just last week, BioNTech SE agreed to acquire British artificial intelligence (AI) startup InstaDeep for the equivalent of up to $682 million, the firm’s largest takeover deal ever. Per the Chemical Engineer, BioNTech’s acquisition will support the company’s strategy to build capabilities in AI-driven drug discovery and development of next-generation immunotherapies and vaccines.

Several months ago, Nvidia announced the launch of its BioNeMo Large Language Model (LLM) service to help researchers build new artificial intelligence (AI) models for biology, which was used to build a new generative AI model that could…