Various industries such as manufacturing, automobile, and biotech,
and pharmaceutical showed a strong interested in adopting artificial
intelligence technology nowadays. AI is recognized as what will become the
leading general-purpose technology in the 4.0 industrial revolution which is an
ICT revolution involving big data and cloud. In South Korea, the government
announced that they will spend $21.7 million supporting the discovery and
development of innovative medicine using artificial intelligence (AI) in the
next 3 years.
According to Ministry of Food and Drug Safety addressed that
South Korea’s pharmaceutical and bio industries, about 30 Korean pharmaceutical
companies are using AI platform for their work through their own development
and partnership. Moreover, the size of the new drug development market in Korea
which uses AI is estimated to grow 40% annually to reach about $4 billion by
2024. Therefore, South Korea’s biopharmaceutical companies are continuously
seeking to develop new drugs with Artificial Intelligence technology. According
to the pharmaceutical experts, using AI can reduce time and cost of developing
new drugs. For one new drug to come out, more than 10,000 candidate materials
must be reviewed. And even if candidate materials are found, full-time testing
(animal testing) and clinical testing targeting people are highly like to fail.
Furthermore, it takes more than 10 to 15 years to develop a new drug and
requires an investment of about $8.4 billion to $16 billion. Meanwhile, if AI
is helped, the duration of the new drug development will be shortened to an
average of 3 to 4 years which could also reduce the costs.
For example, Cj healthcare, a leading pharmaceutical company
in Korea, announced that they recently signed an agreement with Standigm Inc to
develop new anti-cancer drugs by using artificial intelligence technology for
drugs. In addition, a South Korea’s pharmaceutical company called Daewoong
recently publicized that they made a partnership agreement with A2A
pharmaceutical company in the U.S. Under the accord, the A2A plans to design
new compounds using SCULPT, a new drug design platform combined with artificial
intelligence, while Daewoong Pharmaceutical plans to conduct a material
synthesis and evaluate based on the structure to draw candidate substances for
the new drug.
Currently, the world is now confronted with a pandemic and
this pandemic outbreak has caused many deaths. Due to the pandemic, there is
now a panic around the world. Therefore, many biopharmaceutical companies have
been started to find cure medicine by using futuristic technology and South
Korea’s biopharmaceutical companies also made collaboration with other
international biopharmaceutical companies. Therefore, international companies
with any AI or futuristic related technology should explore opportunities into
Korea. |