The "Four Revolutions" of pharmaceuticals: The Singularity and the birth of Kings on the road to new drug development

In 1992, Choi, a neurologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine in the United States, first proposed Bench to Bedside, that is, from the laboratory to the clinic, in the journal Science.

Translational medicine first appeared as a new term in 1996 in an article in The Lancet.

In 2003, "Translational medicine" was first formally proposed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Since then, the world's top pharmaceutical companies have begun to set up their own translational medicine teams, with Pfizer taking the lead.

Pfizer first established the Translational Medicine team in 2004, focusing on oncology and immunology. And leading translational medicine is perhaps a microcosm of Pfizer's focus on research and development.

Increasing investment in research and development, by 2000, the proportion of research and development expenses revenue rose to 16.8%.

Other translational medicine teams include the founding of the Translational Medicine Research Center (TMRC) in Singapore in 2009.

In addition to creating their own, some pharmaceutical companies have also created translational medicine centers in conjunction with university research institutes, such as

In 2010, Roche established a "strategic alliance" with the University Hospital in Basel to establish the Center for Translational Medicine Research.

In 2012, Bristol-Myers Squibb entered into a strategic partnership with the Duke Institute for Translational Medicine to strengthen translational medicine.

However, due to the large number of departments and personnel involved in translational medicine, high expenditure or its core problem of slow development, especially in the early stage of clinical trials, only a small proportion of trials have been proved to have economic value, and the contradiction between high input and slow output is difficult to solve.

On the other hand, since 2010, the return on R&D of biopharmaceutical companies has been declining, even at one point only about 1.9%. A new solution needs to be found.

Therefore, with the penetration of AI technology in the field of big health, the pharmaceutical industry is also targeting this technology that saves labor and time costs and may disrupt the industry.

04, AI and agile development, the next stop for new drug research and development

The application of AI in vaccine development and drug research is still in the exploratory stage.

With its support in the new drug development process, including:

Drug discovery: target discovery, compound synthesis, new indication discovery;

Preclinical studies: compound screening, crystal type prediction;

Clinical trials: patient recruitment, clinical trial design

In the global pharmaceutical field, by 2020, the TOP10 pharmaceutical companies Roche, Pfizer, Novartis, Merck, GSK, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, BMS, Takeda have carried out AI new drug research and development outsourcing cooperation layout.

The earliest was Merck (Merck), which cooperated with Numerate, an American AI drug development company, to conduct cardiovascular disease target research in 2012.

Pharmaceutical companies partly outsourced AI research and development cooperation, source: Firestone Creation collated according to public information

Just as previous clinical trials, translational medicine and other new drug research and development have undergone changes, the head pharmaceutical companies are also setting up their own AI research and development team, including Pfizer, Roche, Astrazeneca, Eli Lilly, Merck, GSK and so on.

As can be seen from the above data, Novartis and Astrazeneca lead all pharmaceutical companies in both research and development projects and paper publication.

After the establishment of Novartis' AI Innovation Lab in October 2019, cooperation with Microsoft is also in full swing.

Astrazeneca has always been a leader in digital innovation, and at an investor conference in March, its executive vice president of biomedical Research and development, Dr. Mene Pangalos, said that 50% of Astrazeneca's small molecule development projects are now assisted by AI.

The company's in-house REINVENT technology platform enables the creation, selection and validation of candidate molecules through a computer program, while the AiZynth technology platform helps predict the optimal small molecule synthesis route.