Collaboration in our industry has never been more important. I'm reaching out to personally invite you to an insight event the Pistoia Alliance is holding for life science professionals at 4 PM BST / 11 AM EDT on October 13.

Find out how you can get involved in our unique collaborative projects, communities of interest, and networking opportunities. Learn about how our global community of major life science companies, technology and service providers, publishers, patient groups, research organizations, and academic groups are working together to lower the barriers to innovation.

Places are limited - all attendees at our October 13 event will gain an exclusive invitation to join us at our members-only Digital Transformation in R&D Virtual Conference, on October 20.  Reserve your seat today.

• The Emerging Science Technology Session at the Fall Conference will start in the middle of the day at 1:30 pm EST. Our agenda includes:
  • Keynote talk by Tom Chittenden, President, Genuity AI Research Institute & CTO, HiberCell, on the use of AI for the identification of driver genes for susceptibility to severe forms of COVID-19
  • A panel discussion on the Federated Learning in AI and ML with representatives from Owkin, Lifebit, Medexprim, Eicon.ai, Roche, and Institut Curie
  • A research presentation on the TorchDrug.ai platform for drug discovery by Jian Tang, Assistant Professor, CIFAR AI Research Chair, Mila-Quebec AI Institute

A kind reminder that the Pistoia Alliance Fall Conference is a member-only event. Please use your work email address to register.

• View the recording of our recent webinar, “Artificial intelligence in drug discovery: what is realistic, what are illusions?” Our speaker was Andreas Bender, PhD QJ, Reader for Molecular Informatics, University of Cambridge, and Director of Digital Life Sciences, Innovation Campus Berlin (ICB)/Nuvisan. Although artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound impact on areas such as image recognition, comparable advances in drug discovery are rare. We discuss the stages of drug discovery in which improvements in the time taken, success rate or affordability will have the most profound overall impact on bringing new drugs to market. Changes in clinical success rates will have the most profound impact on improving success in drug discovery; in other words, the quality of decisions regarding which compound to take forward (and how to conduct clinical trials) are more important than speed or cost. Although current advances in AI focus on how to make a given compound, the question of which compound to make, using clinical efficacy and safety-related end points, has received significantly less attention. As a consequence, current proxy measures and available data cannot fully utilize the potential of AI in drug discovery, in particular when it comes to drug efficacy and safety in vivo. Thus, addressing the questions of which data to generate and which end points to model will be key to improving clinically relevant decision-making in the future.
• Have a look at these recent publications:
  • Artificial Intelligence Growth Markets
  • AI in the Healthcare Enterprise podcast by the Pistoia Alliance AI CoE steering committee member Prashant Natarajan
  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)-Enabled Medical Devices authorized by the US FDA
  • Machine-learning methods for ligand–protein molecular docking.
  • Review Evaluation of artificial intelligence on a reference standard based on subjective interpretation. This short paper published in the Lancet brings up a neglected topic of using the human judgement as a gold standard for validation of AI methods.

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Community is a great example of the value the Pistoia Alliance delivers to its members. There has never been a more important time to collaborate as an industry, and we hope you find our CoE inspiring and informative.  If you would like to find out more about the benefits of Pistoia Alliance membership and how you can get involved with all the different initiatives we run, please send an email to Membership@PistoiaAlliance.org.