Global biotechnology company Amgen is using artificial intelligence (AI) in the entire process of de..

사진 확대 Paul Burton, Amgen's senior vice president and chief medical officer (CMO), recently gave a interview with Maeil Business Newspaper at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul. Amgen Korea

Global biotechnology company Amgen is using artificial intelligence (AI) in the entire process of developing new drugs, from designing new drug candidates to clinical trials. In the future, it plans to expand the scope of AI use to 'digital twins' that predict the patient's treatment process and outcome. Paul Burton, Amgen's senior vice president and chief medical officer, predicted that by the early 2030s, the expansion of AI utilization will reduce the time required to develop the entire drug by about 25%.

CMO Burton recently met with Mail Business at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul and said, "Using AI, we can design better molecules and treatments faster and connect patients to appropriate clinical trials. Amgen is introducing AI at all stages of new drug development."

In fact, Amgen has significantly reduced the time to prepare documents to be submitted to regulators since using AI. It used to take six months to prepare related documents after completing clinical trials, but now it only takes six weeks.

Accordingly, it is expanding the scope of AI use in clinical trials. Using its own machine learning system "ATOMIC," it will find a clinical trial institution that can connect suitable patients to clinical trials and even proceed with patient registration. AI is also used to make 'Go/No-Go' decisions to determine whether to continue developing new drugs at each clinical stage. It is important to select promising candidates as the cost and time that need to be put into late-stage clinical trials increase. "AI is a tool that complements and strengthens the experience accumulated during clinical development," stressed CMO Burton.

What Amgen is paying attention to as the next step is the 'digital twin'. It is a technology that models a patient's treatment journey with AI to predict when to change to another treatment and how the treatment results will appear.

"The area I'm personally very looking forward to is the digital twin," he said. "I think it's a great opportunity to innovate clinical decision-making methods not only in the development of new drugs but also in medicine as a whole."

There is a vast amount of biological data that Amgen has accumulated on the basis of AI utilization. Amgen previously acquired Decode Genetics, an Icelandic dielectric analysis company, to secure petabytes (PB) of data related to human diseases. It also has an NVIDIA supercomputer called "Freyja" to analyze the situation in Iceland.

CMO Burton said, "AI's performance ultimately depends on what data is put into it," adding, "We continue to develop models for how to design new molecules and how to find optimal targets." "By 2030 these AI systems will be in full operation," he predicted.

However, he drew a line that AI cannot replace clinical trials themselves. "AI cannot replace the clinical trial itself, but it can reduce and accelerate the time required between clinical stages," CMO Burton said. "Personally, AI will reduce the time required to develop the entire drug by about 25% in the early 2030s."