[Interview] Shaping European Life Sciences with AI

Andrii: While AI has been a very emerging thing in the pharma industry five years ago (about time I started covering the topic in this blog), now in 2020 it seems as this technology has come of age and it is a strategic matter for most, if not all, major pharma and biotech companies. But as with every new tech, there are “low hanging fruits” and use cases that are harder to approach with AI. Can you provide your vision as to where AI will be making the biggest and fastest impact in the coming years in terms of practical ROI? Some examples of use cases AI is already making an impact? 

Loubna: The low hanging fruit in pharma is applying AI to drive ROI for the field teams, both in the medical and commercial space. This will have a direct effect on maximising not only ROI but also patient outcomes. By empowering the field teams with AI-driven suggestions about who to talk to and how to communicate with other stakeholders (e.g. HCPs), we can drive the prescription of new treatments to the right patients at a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. There is a tremendous amount of resources that go into identifying the right doctors, building the right scientific evidence, and driving the field teams both on medical and commercial functions. With AI, we can maximise the productivity of these teams exponentially. 

For example, at OKRA we launched our MedCompass AI product to support Medical Affairs teams. This system bridges the communication between key opinion leaders and Medical Scientific Liaisons (MSLs). We use behind-the-scenes AI to combine medical strategy with real-time scientific and market information. MedCompass predicts scientific need and proactively supports MSLs in the delivery of key, personalised information to satisfy expert needs. 

We use AI to empower commercial teams in bringing the right drug to the patients who will benefit from it. OKRA's FieldFocus AI system identifies the best surgeries and hospitals with patients most likely in need of an existing treatment and drives field teams to engage with HCPs in that practice and reach those patients faster, regardless of them being in rural or urban areas. FieldFocus is democratising access to new drugs to the whole population in a country. 

In the coming years, I see AI having an impact on all aspects of pharma. The worldwide adoption of AI will be driven by the automation of laborious, mundane work. AI will free up the time of life science professionals so that they can focus on driving the outcomes that matter most: the patient outcomes. 

At OKRA, we are leveraging all the real-world data and using AI to extract key insights that support the decision-making of life science executives on clinical, medical, and commercial functions. We provide the predictions, suggestions, and explanations that users need to make the right decisions consistently. 

Furthermore, one of the areas where I see AI having the biggest ROI impact in the coming years is in market access. At OKRA, we are pioneering the development of an AI system that leverages all the results of clinical trials, submissions, and pricing data, predicts the price of a new drug and supports the submission process to ensure market approval with the best evidence possible, minimising the time to launch and maximising the benefit for the patient.