How AI and Digital Health are Shaping Pharma

Whether you want AI or digital health to be a focus of your career or not, it can be really inspiring to read up on how the industry is changing. Science is about innovation, right? We’re trying to treat unmet diseases, catch disease sooner, and technology is playing such a cool part in the prevention and treatment of disease. 

Welcome to Your Worthy Career, a podcast for Women in Pharma and Biotech with me, Melissa Lawrence. I am a certified career and leadership coach with a master’s in organizational psychology who has worked in talent and learning development in biotech to large pharma, from non-clinical to commercial. I help women in Pharma and Biotech create a career worthy of them. Whether you want to get clear on what you want, get a new job, get promoted, or be effective as a leader at any level, this is the place for you. Every week, you will get practical career strategies and mindset shifts to help you overcome the problems you experience at work so you can reach your goals feeling better than ever. Your up-level begins now. 

Hey there. Welcome to this week’s episode of your worthy career. Today, we’re going to dive into something a little different.I’m diving into something that’s impacting all of us in one way or another. And that is the rise of digital health, AI, and wearable technology She’s in our industry. It seems everyone is really talking about AI right now. I was at a Women in Bio Her Story gala a few months ago, and my table just started naturally talking about the use of AI and ChatGPT for research to help with writing and even with resume writing. I’ve been asked even a few times myself about my opinions on using AI tools for resume writing. And just to give you an answer to that, I think that when we use AI or ChatGPT GPT correctly, it can be really helpful. But you don’t want to use ChatGPT to just write your resume for you because it won’t sound like you, it won’t be authentic, and it can inflate your experience and work against you. But it definitely can be a helpful tool to brainstorm, to simplify language, to help you identify metrics for your impact stories or achievements on your resume. Now, I was interviewed by Biospace on this particular topic, so I’m not going to go into this angle around AI on this episode today, but I will link to that article in the show notes if you want to take a look at it.

Also, another reason I want to talk about this today. In the last cohort of my group program, Beyond the Ceiling, there was a senior director in project management who wanted to move into digital health. And her experience was in vaccines, and she wanted to know how to best position herself for this pivot. And when she had that very specific goal, it really got me thinking even more about how digital health is changing the industry and how we do research, our technology, and the use of wearables, how clinical trials are run, the way that work is done. So if you’ve been wondering what’s up with all the talk around AI and drug development, or if you’re curious about how wearable tech is changing clinical trials, and more importantly, how you can stay ahead of these trends or maybe even pivot into a company that’s all about digital health, then this is going to be a really great episode for I’m going to share some specific companies that are using AI and digital health. So if you’re interested in what they’re doing, you can follow them. They’re also companies that you might want to look at for your next career move.

Now, as women, we’re no stranger to juggling at all, right? Staying informed about trends, figuring out what skills we need to build next, constantly thinking about how we can guide our careers in the right direction, managing our home life. And the truth is, these trends that we’re seeing right now around technology, they’re not going to go away. If you think about technology just over the course of your life, when technology has been introduced, whether it’s been phones or the radio or whatever it was, Remember when we had the MP3 players or I used to have a Walkman when I was little, right? Those things, they just keep progressing over a year. So now that we have AI, we have digital health, and we have wearables and this technology in our industry, it’s only going to expand from here. So even if you were someone that in the very beginning was a little bit hesitant, and I’m going to say I was one of those people when I started seeing AI and ChatGPT, I was like, what is this? I have my own brain. I don’t need to use this. I don’t need to look into this.

This isn’t going to be part of my job. But now it’s really just taking over. And there’s a lot of great ways that you can use these as tools, both in the health space, but also just in the way that you do your work to make it more efficient without taking away your unique ideas, your unique approaches and ways of working. So there’s only going to be more progress in this area, and companies are making big moves. So that’s just another reason that I wanted to bring this topic to you on the podcast today. So let’s dive in. Let’s start with the one that is probably getting the most attention right now that I’ve heard talked about a lot, which is AI and drug discovery. You’ve probably heard about this in your company meetings or at industry conferences. Maybe you’ve seen something on LinkedIn about this, but I want to give you some specific examples. Companies like Pfizer, they’re partnering with IBM Watson to use AI for identifying new drugs, especially in areas like oncology. So what they’re doing is they’re analyzing huge amounts of data from clinical trials and research papers, and AI is helping by synthesizing that and helping to predict how different compounds might behave.

Now, this is happening right now and helping companies get breakthroughs faster than ever. That is so cool when you think about the impact of that. Now, to quote the source, on Pfizer’s website, they say, Pfizer is one of the first organizations worldwide to deploy Watson, which is part of IBM for drug discovery. And the first to customize the cloud-based cognitive tool tapping into Watson’s machine learning, natural language processing and other cognitive reasoning technologies to support the identification of new drug targets, combination therapies for study, and patient selection strategies in immunoncology. The newly launched Watson for Drug Discovery is a cloud-based offering that aims to help life sciences researchers discover new drug targets and alternative drug indications. The average researcher reads between 200 and 300 articles in a given year. While Watson for Drug Discovery has ingested 25 million medicine abstracts, more than 1 million full-text medical journals in 4 million patents and is regular updated. That’s a lot of material. It was a lot of mouthful to get out for you. Watson for drug discovery can be augmented within organizations’ private data, such as lab reports and can help researchers look across data sets to surface relationships and reveal hidden patterns throughout dynamic visualizations.

That is just really incredible to think about how they’re using AI for drug discovery. Now, here’s another example. Xentia, an AI-driven company that’s working with Sanofi, is actually using AI to design new drug molecules faster than ever before. This means that the time from target identification to clinical trials can be cut down dramatically. So think of how game-changing that is, especially for patients who are waiting for these life-saving treatments. Now, they also have a pretty great website. So I’m going to list all of the companies that I am mentioning in this episode in the show notes so that you can look up the company websites. Because a lot of them, especially ones that are really niched and prioritized around AI and digital health, have some really cool websites with a lot of really different scientific information around how they’re using digital health technologies and AI to partner with pharma and biotech companies. So it’s pretty cool to check out. Now, AstraZeneca is also in the game. They’re partnering with Benevolent AI to speed up drug discovery. They’re focusing on diseases like chronic kidney disease and fibrosis, and they’re using AI to figure out which drug targets are most likely to succeed.

Now, we all know how expensive and time-consuming the process actually is. People outside of the industry don’t really understand that, but we know that. And so this is a really huge deal for the entire industry. Now, I haven’t worked at AstraZeneca for a few years now, but when I did, they did. They were really getting into digital help when it came to machine learning and it came into some of their drug discovery space and the stuff that they’re doing here. So it’s really cool to stay informed of what they’re up to as well because they have a whole strategy around innovation. Now, from Benevolent and ESEA’s website, they say scientists from the two organizations are going to work side by side to combine AstraZeneca’s genomics, chemistry, and clinical data with Benevolent AI’s target identification platform and biomechanical knowledge graph. This is a network of contextualized scientific data, so genes, proteins, diseases, and compounds, and the relationship between them. Machine learning systematically analyzes data to find connections between facts and AI-based reasoning is used to extrapolate previously unknown connections. So together, the companies are going to interpret the results to understand the underlying mechanisms of these complex diseases, and then they’re going to be able to more quickly identify new potential drug targets.

So another really cool story and example. So you might be wondering, what’s the takeaway for your career? You don’t have to be a data scientist. You know I am not in order to stay relevant. You don’t have to be a data scientist to stay relevant. As you know, I am not. But it’s beneficial to get comfortable with AI and how it’s transforming drug development. If your company isn’t already talking about this, they will be soon. And if you’re looking to move into a company that’s all in on digital health, like AI-driven drug discovery, you’re going to want to know how to talk about these technologies and understand their impact on our industry. Because these are just a few examples that I found interesting online. The incorporation of AI is very fast moving, though. You could just do a Google search of a pharma and AI or pharma and digital health, and you’re going to find so many sources that you can dig into around different publications and journals that have been done on this topic, but also company websites and how they’re being innovative and how they’re integrating these things into their work. So even just as a personal story, when I got my mammogram last year, they had an AI add-on.

It wasn’t covered by insurance yet, but they’re now using AI mammograms so that they can do a more thorough read of tumors that may not get caught in a typical scan. So whether you want AI or digital health to be a focus of your career or not, it It can be really inspiring to read up on how the industry is changing. Science is about innovation, right? We’re trying to treat unmet diseases, catch disease sooner, and technology is playing such a cool part in the prevention and treatment of disease. Now, let’s move to another area where AI is getting some attention, and that is in clinical trials. If you’ve been involved in running trials, the recruitment process can be long and frustrating. It’s so important, and you need to find the people to participate. I remember this from back in my day when I worked at Human Genome Sciences and I was working with investigators in the clinical team and helping with their investigator meetings, and recruitment was just always a topic. And so it’s really cool to see technology being used to improve this process as well. Finding the right participants can really slow things down.

But companies like GSK are using AI to make this process faster and more efficient by analyzing patient data to find the best matches for clinical trials. So that’s just one small thing that GSK is doing with AI. And it’s not just about recruitment, right? Novartis is working with Quantum Black, which is McKinsey’s AI division, to analyze real-time data during trials. So what that means is they can make smarter decisions on how trials are run and respond quickly to how patients are reacting to treatments. Because it’s all about using the data to make faster decisions, move more quickly, but with less mistakes. We don’t want to have mistakes and sacrifice that for time. Now, what I think is really exciting and really interesting is the rise of decentralized clinical trials. Now, I was not as familiar with this. What this means is that patients don’t have to keep showing up at a trial site, which would really help with recruitment, if you don’t have to be on site somewhere. Instead, they’re being monitored remotely through wearable technology like Fitbits or Apple Watches. In fact, I even know someone who isn’t part of a clinical trial, but she had some heart issues and she went to the doctor and they suggested that she wear an Apple Watch to monitor her heart rate and so she could do ECGs.

So Pfizer is already using wearables in their Parkinson’s trials to track how patients are responding to treatments in real-time, which is amazing. From their site, from the President of Pfizer Worldwide, R&D, they said, We have an opportunity to potentially redefine how we think about patient outcomes in 24/7 monitoring by combining Pfizer’s scientific medical and regulatory expertise with IBM PM’s ability to integrate and interpret complex data in innovative ways. Isn’t this just so neat? Are you just not geeking out a little bit about this? Even if this isn’t something that you work with, it’s just amazing to see the transformation that’s happening within our industry because of technology. And I’m telling you, the research I did for this episode got me really excited about the future and how technology and AR are going to help not only make jobs easier, reduce human error, but most importantly, get care to patients in a more accessible and effective way. So let me just keep going with these examples, okay? So companies like Science37 and Metable are making it possible to run virtual trials. Imagine participating in a clinical trial from your house with all of your data collected and analyzed through AI.

It’s not only convenient for patients, but also makes trials more accessible to diverse populations, which we all know is so important. Again, check out their website. It’s really cool, Science 37, where you can see how they’re expanding access and improving the outcomes they’re getting for their clinical trials. I think the whole concept around virtual sexual trials is so neat because I was just seeing on the news this morning, what was the statistic? I think it was one in three counties in the United States don’t have an OB/GYN. And over 50 % don’t have a hospital with OB/GYN care. They have to travel outside of their county. That is insane to me. So even in the United States, where people are having babies all the time, there isn’t accessible health care for women to just go and get prenatal care or take care of their bodies during pregnancy or make sure that they’re saved during their pregnancy. Imagine for people that have cancer or other diseases and having to travel far and away to be part of a trial. You may know someone, I know I’ve known people, that they’ve had to travel to other states and go stay far away to participate in a trial to save their life.

So how cool is it that there’s an opportunity to have some virtual or hybrid care where you can be part of those clinical trials, but you don’t have to have the resources or the strength and stamina to travel so far to get that care. That, to me, is just mind-blowing. So other than this just being really cool, how can you leverage this trend for your career? Now, if you’re in clinical operations or project management, or really, I would say this even applies to any technical area, you should stay informed about these technologies. Even if you’re not directly involved in trials, understanding how AI and digital health tools are reshaping them is going to give you an edge. It’s going to give you a vocabulary, a language to use that others may not have that show how you’re staying informed in the business, in trends, you’re building your acumen. And if you’re thinking about moving into a company that’s leading in digital health, knowing there’s even an option for virtual and decentralized trials can be a really key selling point for you to demonstrate your thought leadership in your area, even if you don’t have direct experience in digital health yet.

All right, one more area that I want to touch on is wearables. Now, I’ve had a Fitbit for 100 years. Then I moved to Apple Watch a few years ago. I’ve had the same song back in the day and I had a garment. Now I have an aura ring. So you could say, I like wearables. I like the health data. You can probably tell by this episode how I’m just so excited the way I’m talking about it. The technology piece of health is just really fascinating to me, but it’s used more than just for amateurs like me. So let’s talk about digital therapeutics and wearable tech because they’re not just about managing your fitness goals or getting your steps in or getting your sleep data, which is what I’ve really been into. They’re becoming actual prescription treatments. Companies like Beringer are working with Click Therapeutics to develop digital tools for schizophrenia, where patients get personalized treatments based on their behavior needs. It’s AI, but it’s in a way that directly impacts patient care. And paratherapeutics is leading the way with FDA-approved apps like Reset, which designed for treating substance use disorder. So these digital therapeutics work alongside traditional medication and provide patients with CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, right from their phone.

So again, it’s therapy, but it’s accessible, which can really make a difference in someone’s treatment. Now, wearable health tech is also changing how we monitor disease, which I gave you some examples of that already, but here’s another one. Eli Lilly has teamed up with Apple to use Apple Watch data to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s. They’re using AI to analyze heart rate and activity data to monitor disease progression without patients ever having to step into a doctor’s office. The real-time data collection, it’s not just improving care, it’s changing the way we think about treatment altogether. And like I said, someone in my life is using Underdoctors in order to monitor their heart health. Now, if you’re in regulatory affairs, medical affairs, or even commercial roles, understanding just the rise of digital therapeutics and wearables could really take your career in any direction. If you get really excited about these developments, it might even be something to consider for where you might want to take your career next. There are only going to be more and more companies that are going to utilize AI and digital health in the future. Like I said, if you look at any tech technology, innovation in the history of your life, they’ve all just grown.

They’ve all just expanded. They’ve all got bigger and better. There’s been ones that haven’t worked out, but it’s always expanded and gotten bigger and better. There isn’t where we’ve just gone back to caveman times. We’re always going to be developing. The FDA is increasingly involved in regulating these digital health tools, and companies are looking for people that understand both the regulatory piece and the research and the clinical application. So if you’re looking to move into a company with a strong digital health strategy, these can be some areas that you might want to learn more about. Now, if you want to make the pivot, especially if you haven’t worked in digital health before, it’s more than just saying you’re interested, that you’re passionate, that you could do the job, but it’s demonstrating that you can talk the language. You know the major players, you’re informed of the potential. So I hope these examples really help to inspire and motivate you to learn more about this topic. I believe AI, digital health, and wearable tech are becoming foundational, really, to the future of our industry. Whether you’re staying in your current role and want to stay ahead of the curve, or you just find it really cool, or if you’re thinking about making a move to a company that has these innovations as part of their portfolio, use this episode to spark your curiosity and dig into the topic more.

All right, that’s all for today’s episode. If you found this deep dive into AI, digital therapeutics, and wearable helpful, follow the podcast so you don’t miss a future episode. And I would love it so much if you left me a review on your listening platform, Apple, Spotify, etc. It means so much to me to hear your feedback on what you’re enjoying in the podcast. I get so many messages privately. But if you could just take a second to put that review on Apple, for example, more people will be able to see it and they’re going to be able to encourage other women like you to listen. And that’s just going to get them more help so we can elevate the women in this industry. All right, thank you so much and have an amazing week. 

Hey, the episode is over. I want to let you in on a secret. There are four hidden ways you can use to advance your career as a woman in pharma or biotech that your boss or HR doesn’t want you to know about. These are strategies that are proven to work even after you’ve been told no. Save yourself so much time and advance your career on your terms by downloading the strategies at my website, www.yourworthycareer.com/hidden. They’re completely free. Go get them now.