Moderna Procures Machine Learning Partnership to Boost Generative AI Use In Drug Discovery

Moderna has announced a partnership between itself and OpenAI, allowing the biopharma firm to utilize the latter’s enterprise ChatGPT product to embed custom generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) throughout all of its business functions, from the research to legal departments. Moderna hopes the OpenAI partnership will increase the number of products it rolls out over the next five years.

New data suggests the use of machine learning in drug discovery is expected to eventually cut costs associated with all phases of pharmaceutical development by up to two-thirds. Streamlining the drug rollout process with AI could prove to be a critical development for a number of biopharma firms facing steep patent cliffs throughout the second half of the decade. 

Related ETF & Stocks: VanEck Pharmaceutical ETF (PPH), Moderna, Inc. (MRNA)

Just a week after Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) would allow scientists to “understand most diseases” in the next three to five years, Moderna announced a partnership with ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The biotech company disclosed that its collaboration with OpenAI in early 2023 and noted that 750 generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) developed in ChatGPT Enterprise are now “embedded across Moderna’s business functions – from legal, to research, to manufacturing, to commercial”.

The use of AI to speed the rollout of new drugs is especially critical for Moderna. MRP highlighted Moderna specifically last year as one of the companies that would need to move beyond the “COVID era” that supercharged profits at a number of major biopharma firms, but was increasingly fleeting by 2023. Moderna’s only product currently at the commercial stage is its COVID-19 vaccine and revenues from the shot fell by more than -45% YoY in Q4 2023. Further integration of AI, however, could help the company outpace its current plan to…