Private sector restricts AI aided drug development

AI specialists have revealed that the development of new pharmaceuticals is being slowed because pharmaceutical companies are not distributing their data.

AI programmes filter through millions of pieces of data looking for potential medications, but such advancements are impeded by private businesses’ hesitation to give out data. “The lack of open datasets is a failure of the principle of profit maximisation by individual actors,” said Yoshua Bengio, from the University of Montreal. He revealed that sharing this information “hurts their competitiveness, even though it would help the overall market progress faster to technological solutions.”

Currently, the private sector does not have any viable reason to share their data, it is important that this section of the economy is incentivised to stop keeping information private. However, another contributor to the problem is the coordination problem connecting AI professionals and pharma researchers.

The Covid 19 vaccine was a clear exception to the rule, but most drugs take over a decade to go from research and development to the introduction stage of the product life cycle.

The AMR (Antimicrobial Resistance) Action Fund was established in 2020 by 23 pharmaceutical firms to raise $1 billion in funding to produce antibiotic medications. This was done with the aim to produce drugs that can combat stubborn bacteria.

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