Catalyzed by an exciting range of new, disruptive technologies, the pharmaceutical industry needs to reimagine its future. And the need to reimagine is being driven by shifts which are disturbing the industry’s status quo – pressure to reduce costs and demonstrate greater value, swing from treatment to prevention, and personalized treatments. These shifts are challenging the overall business model of the pharmaceutical companies.

From within the realm of these emerging technologies, AI and advanced analytics are being increasingly adopted by the industry in many diverse and interesting ways. The value of these technologies come from their ability to process large amount of complex, both structured and unstructured data, at a rapid pace to generate actionable insights and thereby reduce costs, improve time to market and gain competitive strength in the market place. While lot of interesting applications are in areas related to drug discovery, applications in other areas such as drug dosage and safety, manufacturing and supply chain and commercialization is being further explored.

Interestingly as far as these technologies are concerned, pharmaceutical companies are choosing their fields of play and also who they play with, with a growing emphasis on collaboration and partnership. Accordingly, the industry is witnessing many such partnerships and quite often with technology start-ups.