WIB-Southern California: The Age of AI – Pioneering the Future of Medicines, November 15, 2023

On Wednesday, November 15, 2023, the WIB-Southern California chapter hosted a panel to discuss how AI-enabled systems are transforming each stage of the drug discovery process and redefining the industry’s speed and economics. The event was held at the wonderful Mintz facility in San Diego, California, and brought together over 60 participants. After the networking reception, Yuchen Wang, Chapter Chair of WIB-Southern California, introduced WIB and extended a warm welcome to the distinguished panelists. The lineup included Krithi Rao Bindal, MS, PhD, MBA CEO and Founder of Aroga Biosciences; Qi Zhang JD, LLM, Patent Attorney Mintz Levin; Jessica Gibson, MBA, BSc, CEO and Co-founder of Ariel Precision Medicine, and Vaishnavi Naryan, BSCpE, McpE, Senior Machine Learning Engineer, GATC Health. Krishna Allamneni, BVSc, PhD, DABT, CDO Concarlo Therapeutics, served as the moderator for this panel.

Our panelists shed light on how AI-enabled systems are and will impact each stage of drug discovery, from significantly cutting down on the time and failure rate from drug identification to approval to selecting the appropriate demographic for clinical trials and mitigating the Phase 2 “valley of death”. They discussed how the FDA is evolving to provide guidance on the use of AI in drug development and critically how patent protection of AI models used to discover new therapeutics may be enacted. There was a lively question session after the panel with much engagement amongst the audience, including many taking advantage of direct interaction with the panelists and moderator in the closing networking session. This event clearly captured the enquiring minds of many, and we hope that a future WIB event will probe in more detail the AI approach using real-world examples and success stories to demonstrate how it may deliver what is promised.

Written by Lauren Bradley