Sartorius Benefits From AI-Driven Drug Development, Clinical Trials Cost Cutting
My main focus on this blog is health tech, but the overlap with drug development is getting increasingly bigger. From Deutsches Ärzteblatt (translated):
Göttingen – Laboratory services provider and pharmaceutical supplier Sartorius sees particular opportunities in the use of artificial intelligence (AI). The technology helps customers develop more drug candidates in the same amount of time, said Sartorius CEO Michael Grosse at the presentation of the nine-month figures.
The Göttingen-based company is benefiting from an increase in new developments among its customers, which require laboratory testing, for example, using Sartorius products. "AI is a kind of accelerator," said Grosse. The technology helps to develop new biopharmaceuticals. This benefits, among other things, the development of drugs for rare diseases.
Research institutes and companies use AI to generate more and better drug candidates, especially in treatment areas where complex biological data, structural modelling or small patient populations create bottlenecks. Cancer, neurological diseases, rare diseases, antimicrobial diseases and infectious disease all greatly benefit from this technology.
As Sartorius reports, this is great for companies that service that part of the pipeline. In a gold rush, don't dig for gold; sell shovels. NVIDIA and Corti are doing the same thing on the tech side.
But while AI expands the upper part of the funnel - the pre-clinical development and testing - translating that into humans is still the most expensive and time-intensive part of the process. Without additional funding, and unless clinical trial budgets suddenly increase or clinical trial costs decrease, a pharma company is still forced to put all its eggs into one basket and go forward with one of the 50 other potentially equally promising drug candidates that made it to the end.
And while there are undoubtedly plenty of investor money waiting to be deployed, it is that cost-saving part where AI can change the equation without the equity price-tag that comes with taking an external investment. Reportedly, around 50-60% of clinical trial costs are around clinical procedures, monitoring and site management, and another 20% go for patient recruitment. Those patients are the same patients that visit the hospitals and those hospitals are the same hospitals where the clinical trials run. That means that the tools used for the regular clinical workflow are the same that are used for the clinical trial workflow; only the costs are covered in a different way.
When we think about the healthcare tech stack, we tend to view it from the perspective of the public healthcare system, not the private drug development process. But the HIS, LIS, PACS and all the other apps and agents is where clinical work gets done, independently of the use case. So that the structural shift that the healthcare market is going through is going to have a very real impact on how pharma conducts clinical trials, ultimately shooting two birds with one stone.