Microsoft has reached an agreement with pharmaceutical giant Novartis. The deal aims to bring the power of AI to drug discovery, enabling the discovery of novel drugs with less human effort than ever before.
AI To Discover And Develop Drugs
“Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most transformational technology of our time, and healthcare is perhaps AI’s most pressing application,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video announcing the partnership.
The five-year agreement will establish an “AI innovation lab” at Novartis and create co-working centers at Novartis’ offices in Switzerland and Dublin, and at the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, England. The aim is to arm Novartis employees with AI and cloud computing firepower to discover next-generation medicines.
Google and Amazon are also both vying to convince researchers and drug manufacturers to use AI and cloud platforms to solve complicated scientific challenges. This year, the Google DeepMind won a competition against top researchers in which it predicted how disease-fighting proteins fold. Amazon’s attempts to win over drug research teams landed the company customers like AstraZeneca, Merck, and Celgene.
Novartis is planning to deploy Microsoft AI tools across the entire development process. This will include research, clinical trials, manufacturing, operations, and finance.
Microsoft and Novartis will initially focus on the following projects:
- Create personalized therapy for muscular degeneration, a cause of blindness.
- Improve the manufacturing of gene and cell therapies with AI work beginning with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
- Use neural networks to identify molecules useful for treating diseases.
Cutting Edge Drugs
“Developing new drugs has become as much an AI and data science problem as it is a biology and chemistry problem,” Microsoft Healthcare corporate vice president Peter Lee wrote in a blog post recently. “The impact in terms of lives saved worldwide would be enormous if we could make inventing new medicines faster.”
Previously Microsoft and Novartis worked together on a program that assesses the neurodegenerative disease multiple sclerosis by using Microsoft Kinect.
The companies did not disclose any financial details of the deal so far. The previous work Microsoft did with life sciences companies offers a clue as to how they approach such alliances. In a collaboration with Seattle-based Adaptive Bio-technologies on an AI-driven universal blood test, Microsoft invested $45 million in exchange for a commitment by Adaptive to spend $12 million on Azure cloud services over a seven-year period alongside a promise to host a platform they created on the Microsoft cloud. This is a win-win for both companies and expands the chances for radical progress in drug discovery and development.
