Artificial Intelligence, a Major Factor Behind Pfizer’s US$900M Profit

Pfizer has effectively used AI to conduct vaccine trials and streamline the distribution.

Pfizer has been on the headlines quite often recently. The Covid-19 vaccine is what made the company atop other field competitors. Remarkably, Pfizer has also yielded the benefit of US$900 million in the first quarter of 2021, thanks to its vaccine production and distribution programs. But behind the vaccine making and circulation, disruptive technologies played a big role in finding the correct drug and helped the company in its trials. Pfizer has effectively used artificial intelligence to conduct vaccine trials and streamline the distribution.

Throughout its vaccine journey, Pfizer made big decisions to stay ahead in the race and served people with an effective solution to the spreading coronavirus. Finally, the pharmaceutical company emerged with a successful vaccine that is 95% effective. However, throughout its vaccine process, Pfizer took the help of artificial intelligence to make the Covid-19 vaccine serve the purpose of people. Today, Pfizer's vaccine is disproportionately reaching the world's rich countries. The pharmaceutical company is also inching towards promoting its dose for children below 18. Pfizer has always owed its success to the core research and scientist team that worked day and night to achieve a beneficial solution. Fortunately, the other element that helped the company create its Covid-19 vaccine in less than a year was its past investment in digital infrastructure. Even before the pandemic, Pfizer started digitizing its research & development operations and implemented artificial intelligence in its working system. During the vaccine trials, the company used artificial intelligence software to help find signals within millions of data points in its 44,000 person study. In this article, we'll take you through the digital initiatives that brought success to Pfizer's vaccine motives and other drug makings.

IBM Watson, the early partner of Pfizer in drug discovery

Let's begin with Pfizer's very old collaboration with a tech company. In 2016, the pharmaceutical company joined hands with IBM Watson for drug discovery. Today, Pfizer is still using IBM's artificial intelligence technology on its immune-oncology research, a strategy of using a body's immune system to help fight cancer. While human researchers can only read 200 to 300 science articles a year, technology ingested 25 million medicine abstracts, more than 1 million full-text medical journal articles, and 4 million patents, which eventually helped in Pfizer's drug discovery.

Iktos' artificial intelligence to predict small molecule activities

Pfizer has befriended Iktos, a virtual drug design tech firm to tap its artificial intelligence for discovery work. This is the recent partnership that happened in March 2021. The pharmaceutical company will use Iktos' for de nova design to 'select Pfizer small-molecule discovery platforms.' The collaboration will open the door for the company to use AI in an increasingly fair way. It will help to seek out, model, and better predict small-molecule activities to help Pfizer know which targets are likely to get to the finishing line and return big profits. By combining Iktos' AI algorithm and data science, Pfizer will reap many drug discovery benefits that will better the chance to be realized and impact therapeutic development.

AI-powered tool to quickly clean vaccine clinical data

Pfizer took artificial intelligence as a core technology to power its Covid-19 vaccine motives. The disruptive trend was the main reason how the pharmaceutical company managed to roll out its vaccine in less than a year. Pfizer made a number of partnerships with digital players and even conducted a hackathon to choose its right mate.

Generally, vaccine making and clinical trials are a lengthy process that takes months, and sometimes, years to complete. But the scientists working in Pfizer raced to develop the Covid-19 vaccine due to its immediate need and deteriorating global situation. During the vaccine rollout process, the pharmaceutical company used artificial intelligence in many phases of vaccine making and trials. For example, it usually takes more than 30 days to post the trial phase for patient data to be cleaned up, so scientists can then analyze the results. The manual process involves data scientists to go through datasets to check for coding errors and other inconsistencies that naturally occur when collecting tens of millions of data points. Fortunately, technology reduced the workload seamlessly. A new machine learning tool called 'Smart Data Query (SDQ)' performed analysis and made the data available in just 22 hours after meeting the primary efficacy case counts. The machine learning tool also ensured data quality throughout the trial, leaving very little human intervention.

But to achieve this instant result, Pfizer conducted a hackathon to select its partner. The pharmaceutical company's 'incubation sandbox' invited start-ups, large technology companies, individuals, and other institutions to help solve complex research challenges. The competition was to develop an AI-powered tool to quickly clean clinical data. As a result, Pfizer joined hands with the winner, Saama Technologies, a California-based software company to proceed with its accelerated vaccine trials.