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AI Pharma Deals: Novartis and AI Startups

AI meets Drug Discovery

By Marina T AlamanouPublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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Photo by Aideal Hwa On Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/OYzbqk2y26c)

Novartis in the era of Artificial Intelligence

Big pharmas have been actively pursuing AI startups lately and some companies that lead the way in terms of the number of AI partnerships are Pfizer and AI Startups (Pfizer mentioned AI six times in its corporate reports between January 2020 and June 2021) AstraZeneca and AI Startups (AstraZeneca is spearheading the AI hiring race advertising for 676 new jobs between January 2020 and June 2021), Bayer and AI Startups (an AI leader with seven new AI deals announced from January 2020 to June 2021), Takeda and AI Startups (Takeda Pharmaceutical Co Ltd was third with 545 new job listings in the AI hiring race) and GSK and AI Startups. Other pharmaceutical companies that have recently forged deals in this area include Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), Roche, Janssen, Merck, Boehringer Ingelheim and Sanofi. But today, I am going to talk about Novartis.

According to GlobalData analysis, Bayer AG (1st) and Novartis AG (2nd) are leading the way for AI investment among top pharma companies, with Novartis having advertised for 253 positions in AI, made five deals related to AI, filed one patent and mentioned AI four times in company filings between January 2020 and June 2021, promoting in this way a universal shift towards a data-centric drug discovery.

For this reason, Novartis' AI Innovation Lab is trying to build an interface with those data R&D-driven companies and academic institutions to understand the long-term vision and roadmap of AI drug discovery. In particular, Bülent Kiziltan Novartis' Head of Causal & Predictive Analytics of the AI Innovation Lab that drives the internal AI innovation, is trying to leverage AI in discovering new causal relationships, either at the compound level or at the patient level that can be used for precision medicine to customise therapeutics.

For example, Novartis (October 2020) opened a new digital health innovation hub in Canada (the Canadian Biome Digital Innovation Hub based in Montreal at the AI research institute, Mila, that has already formed a strategic alliance with Novartis in 2019), to help develop “scalable, digital solutions” for patients and healthcare providers.

The Canadian Biome has already a partnership with Canadian virtual care specialist company Insig Health to launch a digital health accelerator, with Canadian ConversationHEALTH which develops AI healthcare chat-bots and with Amblyotech a US-based digital therapeutics startup for treating amblyopia (“lazy eye” a leading cause of vision loss in children and young adults).

Regarding Amblyotech, Novartis announced on April 20, 2020 that it has completed its acquisition and in collaboration with Ubisoft and McGill University, will pursue the development of the acquired digital technology for the treatment of amblyopia.

But Novartis has established also other AI centres in the US and UK.

For example, Novartis is partnering

  • with University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute (2019), a partnership in order to predict how patients respond to drugs. The work will combine different types of data, such as clinical, imaging and genomics data.
  • is member of the EU MELLODDY project (an EU public-private partnership funding health research and innovation) which aims to establish a ML platform that would make it possible to learn from multiple sets of proprietary data while respecting their highly confidential nature, as data and asset owners will retain control of their information throughout the project. In 2020, contributors to the three-year MELLODDY project announced they have reached their first-year objective: successfully deploying the platform to accelerate drug development.
  • with McKinsey’s QuantumBlack to analyse clinical trial operations with ML, claiming that the work has reduced patient enrolment times by 10-15%.
  • and is a member of MLDPS (Machine Learning for Pharmaceutical Discovery and Synthesis), which is a collaboration with MIT to develop software for automating small molecule discovery and synthesis. The MLDPS consortium already includes eight industry partners, including Amgen, BASF, Bayer, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Sunovion, and WuXi.

However, since also many low/middle-income countries have the potential for adopting AI technologies in health, the Novartis Foundation has translated a freely-available online assessment tool: AI in Health Maturity, that will help countries identify where to best invest resources to enable successful deployment of impactful AI solutions in health.

Novartis and Tech Giants

Novartis started a new five-year collaboration with Microsoft to establish an AI innovation lab alongside joint research projects at multiple international centers (at Novartis’ campuses in Switzerland and Ireland, as well as at Microsoft’s research lab in the UK).

This partnership will start with three specific projects:

  • implementing AI-based approaches to help personalise treatments for macular degeneration and irreversible blindness (through image segmentation and analysis);
  • increasing the efficiency of cell and gene therapy manufacturing,
  • and expediting Novartis’ processes for designing and generating new therapeutic molecules.

“Pairing our deep knowledge of human biology and medicine with Microsoft’s leading expertise in AI could transform the way we discover and develop medicines for the world”. Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan

Moreover, the Novartis Foundation is collaborating with Microsoft AI4Health and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Brazil on the AI4Leprosy initiative, which aims to develop a screening assistance tool to accelerate leprosy diagnosis. The group collected and processed anonymised skin lesion images from leprosy patients in Brazil and these data trained an AI model to assess the probability of leprosy. The protocol and results of the first model will be published in 2021.

On 24 June 2021, it was announced that Novartis is collaborating also with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to accelerate the use of data and digital technologies for: identifying and integrating complex data sources related to health; advancing the application of AI, ML and geo-spatial analytics to these data; and expanding access to technology in remote and underserved locations. Initially, this partnership will seek to develop a disease surveillance solution for dengue fever, initially focusing on India.

In addition, a March 2018 report described a partnership with IBM Watson to improve clinical trial recruitment; and Intel is working also with Novartis to apply AI to high content screening.

Finally, Novartis signed a partnership agreement with Shenzhen-based tech platform provider, Tencent Holdings to develop a mini-app known as AI Nurse. The app is an AI-driven disease management tool to enable the prognosis and diagnosis of heart failure in people.

Since official rollout began, 300+ China’s leading hospitals in over 100 cities have started to embed the digital solution in standard discharge protocol, with over 25 000 patients recruited and AI Nurse helped patients track their health at home on a daily basis, and interact with their hospital.

Novartis and AI Startups

Novartis has partnered with Ada Health on May 2021, a digital health company in Berlin Germany that helps to diagnose symptoms and offer treatment advice using an AI-enabled platform. Ada’s diagnostic assessments are backed by AI algorithms that use a massive repository of clinical data to match a user to potentially unconsidered conditions (such as axial spondyloarthritis, along with psoriatic arthritis and familial Mediterranean fever).

And Novartis isn’t the only Big Pharma interested in Ada’s technology. Also Leaps by Bayer, the Big Pharma’s dedicated investment arm, contributed a large chunk of the $90 million financing (May 2021) that would allow Berlin-based Ada to expand in the US and continue developing its AI-powered technology.

On July 2021, the Global Initiative of Novartis Oncology “Breaking Barriers Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) Challenge”, recognised a Bulgarian project that aims to develop a digital solution for early detection of breast cancer through AI analysis of thermal images, as one of its six winners. The project was developed by Bulgarian AI thermal imaging startup Kelvin Health (a spin-off from image recognition company Imagga, established in 2020 with the mission to combine thermal imaging and AI to allow for remote disease screening), Novartis Bulgaria and MORE-Darzalas Foundation. The thermal camera that is part of their solution detects the body temperature projected on the skin by the particular underlying organ and if there is an abnormal change in the temperature of a particular organ, this means the blood flow in the area is not normal. Then, the images from the camera are processed by an AI algorithm, which is being trained to recognise and report for malformations in the breast tissue.

RetinAI Medical AG (Bern, Switzerland) announced in 2020 a multi-year collaboration with Novartis under which RetinAI’s AI tools will be employed to support multiple projects in ophthalmology and digital health. RetinAI has a CE-marked web-based software platform, the RetinAI Discovery®, used today to navigate imaging data, imaging biomarkers and track changes over time for some of the most common forms of eye diseases.

Novartis was one of Canadian BenchSci's first customers for its AI-Assisted Antibody Selection product, and the first customer for BenchSci's AI-Assisted Reagent Selection product. BenevolentAI also announced a partnership with Novartis to use its AI platform for personalising oncology treatments (2019).

Finally, as the confidence in AI drug discovery/development continues to grow new partnerships between AI startups and pharmas are announced daily, with a total of $11.8 billion funding in the industry and a total of $2.1 billion invested already this year (2021) for AI in drug development (insight engines, drug design and clinical trials).

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#science #health #pharma #AI_drugdiscovery #drugdiscovery #AI #biotechAI  #pharma_AI  #startup

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About the Creator

Marina T Alamanou

Life Science Consultant #metaphysicalcells

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