Sanofi (SNY) is betting big on AI and expects it to play a more dominant role in the drug industry over the next next decade, CEO Paul Hudson told Yahoo Finance.
The big appeal of AI? Faster timeline for drug development, he said.
This has become especially important for companies looking to speed up development as pressure increases from the Inflation Reduction Act, which has given Medicare power to negotiate drug prices in a certain number of years after a patent's filing.
Companies have sued over this provision claiming it cuts short their ability to fully monetize a drug, especially when pursuing multiple uses for the same medication—and could hamper future innovation.
Hudson said AI, if it can be used from discovery through development, might have a positive impact on that timeline. "It doesn't stop us innovating, but in the small molecule context...we hope that AI will give us a much higher probability of success," Hudson said.
That's because relying on AI and machines can help companies do a number of things in parallel, so the multiple uses — called indications — can be more efficiently studied at one time, easing the burden on the scientists in charge of the studies.
It's why Hudson is so bullish on the technology, and has made a number of investments in AI-focused pharmaceutical companies.
Sanofi struck a $5.2 billion deal with Exscientia, a cancer biotech, $1.2 billion deal with Atomwise, an AI drug discovery company, and invested $180 million in French startup Owkin, also an AI biotech — all in 2022 alone.
The company is focused on "where can we lean in and do some very important, disruptive work," Hudson said. "If we can improve the probability of success all the way from selecting targets to making sure we can deliver broad clinical programs to support that with evidence, we should try and do it more efficiently and — dare I say — faster."
The ability to speed up discovery was famously proven during the pandemic, when Moderna (MRNA) utilized Amazon's cloud platform, AWS (AMZN), to identify the right formula for its Covid-19 vaccine.
But Moderna was a smaller biotech then—and had been building its reliance on AWS for years prior to the pandemic. Sanofi, by comparison, is one of the top 10 pharma companies, by revenue, and has to transform its tech use.
It's why Hudson said the company has a two-pronged approach. The first is the drug discovery and pipeline. The other: introduce AI as part of the daily workflow. He calls this "snackable AI," and said it can nudge users to get more comfortable with the technology.
To that end, the company launched an app in June, called plai, to collect data and insights internally for its employees across Sanofi's global footprint.
"We can now start to summarize and synthesize insights across our business from text, and from our archives, to make us more effective. We've never had these tools before," he said. "We want to be the first at-scale AI pharmaceutical company. And I think we've started that very well."
Follow Anjalee on Twitter @AnjKhem.
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