Let’s Get Digital! A look at ��ֳ�’s digital transformation in R&D

Vanco Vlastimil (��ֳ� S.A.) — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 11:22:17 +0000

Lévina Caufriez, Research & Development Communications

Vanco Vlastimi… Wed 30/03/2022 - 13:22

Around the world, technology is changing how patients experience healthcare, how healthcare professionals practice medicine, and how pharmaceutical companies like ours conduct research and provide medicines to those who need them. Research and development is at the very heart of what we do here at ��ֳ�, and we are amplifying the power of scientific innovation through digitalisation to create sustainable value, ensuring that patients get the solutions they need and can live the lives they choose.

Creating patient value in a digital age

At ��ֳ�, our central mission is to deliver value for people living with severe immunological and neurological diseases now and into the future. To do this, we've recognised that leveraging digital technology throughout the business is not just a choice but a necessity; it allows us to think outside the box and create transformative projects that meet patients where they are. Our Digital Care Transformation (DCTx) approach aims to use data and technology with purpose throughout the whole value chain, for both drug and non-drug solutions, as we know patient value extends beyond the molecule.

Today’s patients consider themselves as active participants in their care journey; they are increasingly demanding more personalised and convenient healthcare solutions. To meet these demands, we’re creating digital initiatives that unlock holistic, personal and efficient value – generating value for patients from more than just drugs.

Embracing digital business transformation to accelerate solutions

��ֳ� is making strides through digital business transformation to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of our operations, creating new – or modifying existing – processes and tools to deliver additional value for patients and stakeholders.

Discovery

In drug discovery, we’re implementing digital business transformation initiatives with the aim of increasing the speed at which we deliver solutions to patients. The ��ֳ� Moonshot effort, developed in partnership with PostEra – a start-up biotech company that maps routes for drug synthesis using AI algorithms – is working to test and refine crowdsourced drug designs, sourced from medicinal chemists, to develop an anti-viral treatment for COVID-19.

The initiative is not only providing better research data-driven insights to fast-track the discovery of therapeutic molecules and improve patient journeys, but also helping to find “pockets” that may not have been seen before and re-envision “undruggable targets”.

Efficiency

The last decade has introduced new computational methods which increase the cost-effectiveness and efficiency in the pharmaceutical industry. The digitalisation of patient records and clinical trials, the advent of cloud computing, the growth of wearable devices and the medical Internet of Things (mIoT) has transformed clinical development with an explosion of data.

In development phase, our Statistical Science & Innovation group at ��ֳ�, recently filed a patent application centred around an improved machine learning method. The application has been designed to search through a large hypothesis space to identify the most valuable pieces of information and allows AI to predict an outcome or provide decision guidance. This innovation has already been used to inform patient stratification, clinical trial design and precision medicine approaches for Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

Being Data-Enabled

At ��ֳ� we use data analysis to answer questions and inform better decisions on behalf of patients and caregivers, which has had a tremendous impact on how we work, as well as how efficiently we can deliver results. For example, the use of analytics and machine learning throughout our drug discovery, development, and innovation processes means we can optimise the way clinical trials are designed. This includes patient selection, automated analysis of trial data and enhanced logistics operations. All this work is expanding, allowing ��ֳ� to build a platform to maximise the value of our data for patients.

Connected

Collaboration is an important component of innovation and scientific breakthroughs within ��ֳ�, which is why we partnered with several of the top digital health companies in 2021.

One key example is our partnership with Microsoft, which combines our deep knowledge in bioscience with Microsoft’s unmatched expertise in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) to reinvent how we create new medicines. The ambition is to establish a 360° data-enabled view of patient populations to discover and develop medicines faster for people living with severe diseases. This collaboration opportunity with Microsoft will provide AI technology to work alongside ��ֳ�’s scientists and data specialists, to break boundaries and allow ��ֳ� to discover new correlations and patterns critical to finding innovative and highly individualized medicines.

At ��ֳ� we are committed to refining and evolving our digital research and development strategy with partners and collaborators, to best serve patients who are the driving force of our motivation for all that we do. The opportunity and challenge is to be continuously innovating and intensely curious as industry leaders to create patient value in the digital age.

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Collaborating with Microsoft to reinvent how medicines are made

eCMSadmin — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Collaborating with Microsoft to reinvent how medicines are made

Herman De Prins, Information Technology

eCMSadmin Tue 02/03/2021 - 10:00

Our ambition at ��ֳ� is to transform the lives of people living with severe diseases in immunology and neurology. We want to use all the scientific advances at our disposal to develop life-changing therapies that will help patients live their lives to their fullest.

We also believe in partnership for greater impact. Our scientists collaborate with an open approach to innovation. And that equips us to meet today’s biggest healthcare challenges.

And that is why I am so excited about our new collaboration with Microsoft. We’re combining our deep knowledge in bioscience with Microsoft’s unmatched expertise in computer science and AI to reinvent how we create new medicines.

To give you a bit of history, our new collaboration with Microsoft builds on a series of work we’ve been doing with Microsoft, of which one was the recent COVID Moonshot project. Our medicinal and computational chemists contributed compound designs to this worldwide open-science project to create an orally bioavailable anti-viral for COVID-19.

We collaborated with Microsoft AI for Health during this project, using Microsoft Azure to complete an extensive computational screening and compound design. And I am proud to say we contributed the most potent series of compounds to the project. What’s more, we completed the screening and compound design in just three days—thanks to the support of Microsoft’s technology.

After all, many areas of drug discovery require us to analyze high-dimensional datasets or multi-modal unstructured information. And Microsoft’s applied scientists and AI algorithms can help us discover new correlations and patterns within those high-dimensional datasets and multi-modal information in a relatively short space of time.

These discoveries could help us in so many different ways. For example, they could help us explore a vast chemical space, test many hypotheses and identify more effective molecules. Or they could help us bring new therapeutics to market quicker.

They could also help us identify the causes of disease at a molecular level or understand what makes a patient’s journey unique. And that would allow us to personalize and differentiate therapeutics so that they have a bigger impact on our patients’ lives—and do that in a sustainable way.

We are standing at the edge of a new beginning in medicine development. With Microsoft at our side, we will harness data and technology alongside human expertise and creativity to uncover new insights, understand diseases better, enhance patient experiences and develop more personal and more effective patient care.

I can’t wait to see what our collaboration brings…

innovation

Microsoft COVID Moonshot AI

Comment:

Posted by Eddy Warrand , 6 March 2021

I wish you great successes in the development of this program of which I am a strong believer.
It is clear that only through joint efforts between scientists and IT specialists that we will be able to develop quicker and better solutions for those who need it. AI, machine learning and science in a combined effort is the winning team of the future!

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COVID Moonshot

Let’s Get Digital! A look at ��ֳ�’s digital transformation in R&D

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Collaborating with Microsoft to reinvent how medicines are made

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COVID Moonshot

Let’s Get Digital! A look at ������ֳ�’s digital transformation in R&D

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Collaborating with Microsoft to reinvent how medicines are made

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Let’s Get Digital! A look at ��ֳ�’s digital transformation in R&D